Hello and Goodbye
by broken mind
Summary: When you have to choose one over the other, people get hurt - every single time. Kylie McLeod and Hercules Hansen learn the hard way - and it will take so much more to be forgiven. CHAPTERS 10 IS UP. Please read and review. A little TLC never goes unappreciated. *muak*
1. Chapter 1

September 4, 2014. Sidney, Australia.

It was the fourth Kaiju to emerge from the breach. Scissure, they had named it. And it was huge.

All military branches of the Australian Defense Force joined together in the effort. The RAAF, the aerial warfare branch of the Australian Defense Force, was quick to establish an Intelligence outpost in Towra Point in Botany Bay, using the naturally hilly coastline as cover. They had learned the hard way from the previous 3 attacks and were prepared, or so they thought.

The first Kaiju, Trespasser, had laid waste to San Francisco on August 10th the year before. The beginning of the incident was believed to be a 7.1 earthquake that was felt anywhere along the Pacific coast. However, it was a massive, three-hundred-foot creature that eventually emerged from San Francisco Bay. After destroying the Golden Gate Bridge, the creature went on a 35-mile rampage across the West Coast for six days, destroying most of San Francisco, Sacramento and Oakland. The United States and British militaries responded and battled the creature, but despite the use of troops, tanks, artillery and jets, the combined forces of the two armies failed to bring the massive beast down. Out of options, the military decided on using tactical nuclear missiles in the hopes of bringing down the creature but the loss on the human side was high. Three cities were left devastated and tens of thousands of people had died. "K-DAY", they had called it.

The event was broadcasted all over the news, but everybody had believed that it had been an isolated incident. Everything had returned to normality, everybody had moved on.

Only 6 months later, another monster named Hundun appeared and assaulted the Filipino capital of Manila. Four more months after that, a third Kaiju, Kaiceph, caused substantial destruction in Cabo San Lucas. The only weapon proving to be effective in killing the Kaiju were nuclear. All countries with coastal lines to the Pacific were joining in the nuclear armament build-up in order to be prepared if there were any more attacks.

And now there was a Kaiju attack on Sidney. Her home. Sure, bad things happened all the time all over the world but when it finally happened on your doorstep, it became a totally new reality.


	2. Chapter 2

Kylie McLeod, a former Maritime Aviation Warfare Officer, had been working for the Royal Australian Airforce as Air Battle Manager for over 6 years now, controlling the tactical battle space and coordinating and integrating an array of ADF and Coalition aircraft and forces in combat operations. Today however, she was commissioned to supervise and work with the analytical engineering detail stationed at Towra Point in charge of computer simulations to figure out the best way of ending the creature and relaying all Intel to the fighter pilots.

They were using the old base at Towra Point because it held several vantage points. It was situated on higher ground on the shore line, and there were a couple of large hangars surrounding two full-range radar towers – to share the outrageous amount of influx of information.

Army, Airforce and Navy were doing their part but in the end, the only thing that at least got the Kaiju's attention was airborne attacks. The funny thing was that since the military was seemingly holding the creature at bay, people in the city did not get overly worried. They went about their daily routines, placing full trust in the RAAF to take the Kaiju down before it reached Sydney. The military, however, was not able to fend off the creature, not even with a nuclear missile attack some 200 km off North Head in the open sea. It merely delayed the creature before it finally tore into Downtown Sidney where it caused mayhem for three days.

One of her co-workers had the unfortunate job to compile and analyze the incoming data of destruction and make them visible on the big screen, which made the disastrous devastation a little too obvious, a little too real. Every time the lights designated to a specific area lit up, indicating the passing of the Kaiju, and ultimately, that area's obliteration, everybody around would fall silent. Some had tears in their eyes, men and women alike.

Three days!

It took the military three days to lure the monster to a more or less isolated location around the area of Garigal National Park.

For Kylie, it was three days packed with panic and worry. Three days of not being able to return to her family, not even being able to reach them for the past couple of hours – three days of 15 minute naps every now and then and no sleep during the night, which was the time the monster was most destructive and vicious – three days of not being able to provide solutions for the fighter pilots.

Lindfield, a small area with mostly gated communities was where her parents lived and it bordered Garigal National Park where the Kaiju was now bringing about pandemonium levels of devastation.

She had left for work in a hurry three days ago when the call to duty for all active military personnel had come in, had left her toddler in her parents' care as usual, and now was not able to get a hold of them.

Being in on the radio loop between the fighter pilot commanders and the coordinators at the base, she received the millions of voice exchanges over the comms, most of them as desperate as every other conversation she was hearing from the people around her.

One pilot stood out though, a Fast Jet Pilot on board of a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft named Hansen, designation 149. He was constantly asking – sometimes outright demanding – new Intel, new perspectives, new ways of attack, but unfortunately, most of the time, Kylie could not deliver. And more than once, she would bury her head in her hands.

There had never been a time when she hated her job more than today. Things were not looking good, it all seemed hopeless. Hansen was nagging her over the comm, trying to tell her how to do her job.

"Towra Base, listen! You should be conducting surveillance operations to inform the pilots and shape the mission using whatever long-range sensors and satellite technology you have available!" came his rugged voice over the comm.

"And what in the world do you think I am doing here, 149?" she hollered back into the microphone. "I have been analyzing that data since I got here. And I am giving you every piece of Intel I have. I don't know if you are aware of the fact that we are fighting an alien!" Her voice turned shrill. " _AN ALIEN!_ I am not a fucking magician, I simply cannot give you what you want even if I wanted to!" She fell back into the chair, eyes brimming with tears, hands shaking – that was how desperate she felt.

"Oh, so this is how we're going to play this game?" He growled into the comm.

"I don't know about you, but I'm not in the mood for playing any games!" She spat back. "I've got enough on my plate and I honestly don't need another pain in the ass like you! I'll give you whatever information I have when I have it. If that doesn't work for you, then I'm done with you!"

She could understand where Hansen was coming from but she was just not able to deliver. He was unusually quiet for the next few minutes until he blurted out an "I am sorry" and took up talking to air command and two other pilots.

Everybody was at their wits' end. All simulations had rendered inconclusive, there were too many variables, too little knowledge, too little time. People were dying and the Kaiju seemed to be getting more and more daring and aggressive. However, even though it was huge in height and mass, Scissure was not clumsy and even exhibited behavior that suggested that it possessed at least limited intelligence. And it simply was too strong.

What was left of her unit was in frantic multitasking mode. People were running around like busy bees, scared busy bees, compiling information, reviewing and relaying it, but in the end it became evident that there was no point to all the effort.

Little by little, the large hangar emptied out, as people simply deserted their posts over time. Most of them had families and friends somewhere in the zone and since it was getting clear that there was nothing more that could be done, they simply gave up.

Kylie didn't notice much of it. She was busy trying to get a grip on things – which were obviously slipping out of everybody's hands – and trying to reach her parents. Regular phone communication was close to inexistent because of the massive destruction and also because of the military having taken over most of the channels. The satellite phone and the comm link were the only ways of getting in touch with the outside world, but even there she could tell that gradually less and less pilots send any messages. Only Hansen's impertinent comments reminded her that there was still a battle being fought.


	3. Chapter 3

Scissure was gaining ground and regular missiles caused little to no damage, the only viable option was a nuclear airstrike and it needed to be done quick. Air Vice Marshal Steven Roberton and Warrant Officer Robert Swanwick finally gave the order and issued that the people living in Downtown had about an hour to evacuate, as the blast radius would eradicate most of the zone. Air command issued all fighter pilots to return to base at the same time as the evacuation alarm was sounded over the city. Everybody was supposed to get out of there.

Her breath got caught in her throat and there was a not-so-funny feeling tightening in her guts. For a moment she just sat there, motionless, trying to wrap her mind around what she had just heard. One hour…who could evacuate in one hour? Was the military helping at all? From the information that had been relayed by the Air Vice Marshall, no military ground personnel were to enter the perimeter, only fighter jet pilots. No one would be getting those who couldn't get out of their own – like her parents.

Kylie had used the car to get to work, her parents hadn't had a car ever since they moved into the red brick house in Lindfield, with public transportation just around the corner and shops a couple of blocks away. So there was no car they could take to get out. Maybe there were some helpful neighbors, offering them a ride out of the danger zone.

It was easy for the fighter pilots to get out on time, they had fast and strong engines. Kylie couldn't believe that the government just gave everybody 60 minutes to clear out of the danger zone. They should have known earlier, they must have known earlier! Nobody could just come up with an idea of such a magnitude and shoot a nuclear missile only 5 minutes later. The nuclear strike had always been on the table, it had been discussed in length by her team and among her superiors, and it should have been possible to start evacuation much sooner.

After contemplating for what seemed like an eternity – but it was really just a couple of seconds since time was not something she had to spare – she finally breathed in harshly and drew herself up from the chair. She took the satellite phone and her laptop and made for the parking lot. She could already see her car, pushed the remote control button to open it almost hysterically and had to focus to catch her breath and still her shaking hand in order to jam the key in the ignition. She had to close her eyes for a second and bite back the desperation until she managed to turn it on. Quickly, she reversed out of her parking spot and made for the main entrance. When she had to stop while the gate was being opened, she plugged in the satellite phone and dialed home. There was no answer. She dialed again – and again – and again. Still, there was no answer.

She sped dangerously – desperate as she was – driving as fast as she could back to Lindfield, back to where her parents lived. With moderate traffic, it was normally a 45-minute drive, so even if she somehow got there in time, she had absolutely no clue of how to make it back out of the radiation radius before the shockwave hit. Yet, she decided it was not something to worry about just now, and buried the uncomfortable thought deep in a corner of her mind.

Suddenly, the comm link she had forgotten to turn off in all the haste went crazy. Static, loud white noise, intermittent transmissions. She had just left the Towra Point Peninsula, which harbored the base compound and was now speeding along Captain Cook Drive.

"… need to get … zone of destruction …"

"… orders are … base immediately … no delay accepted …"

"… am at base! Need to return … urgently!

She fumbled at the buttons on the little black box hanging from her belt to identify the frequency until she found the active transmission.

"You are to remain at base!" The static slowly receded when the channel settled.

"Fuck you!" That, in turn, was very clear.

Kylie was almost sure that this was 149, Hansen, cursing. She had gotten quite used to his tone of voice over the last 30 hours. She had no idea however who the other person was, she supposed it was an operator of one of the four military bases.

"Get me a chopper!" She heard Hansen screaming. "I need a damn chopper!"

"Your orders are to remain at base!" The male voice on the other side was surprisingly calm and almost bored, he had most likely repeated that order over a thousand times now – which he probably had. "You need to follow evacuation protocol instructions!"

An impressively long string of old-fashioned and modern swearwords could be heard from Hansen's comm but the other person did not engage back.

Suddenly, the connection cracked and broken white noise set in for a second. Then, Hansen was in her ear. Had he just changed to a private frequency? How could he even know her frequency?

"Towra Base! Come in!"

The shock of being called out like that made her gasp and she realized that she had given herself away. He knew that she was listening.

She sighed. "149, go for Towra Base."

"What is your name?" he asked – once, then again when she didn't answer. His changing tone of voice showed that he was getting impatient when he had to ask for a third time. "What is your name?"

What would it be to him, anyway? She gritted her teeth in frustration but answered nevertheless. "Kylie, Kylie McLeod."

"Ok, Kylie. My name's Herc Hansen, and I need you to listen to me!" Kylie had almost expected a much harsher reply from the man on the other end of the comm, and was taken aback by the desperation she could detect in his words. "I need you to tell me where I can find a chopper, like right about now!" There was a short pause and Kylie wanted to laugh at herself for ever believing that he could find it in himself to say anything nice.

However, when Hansen came back on, his voice had an even more distressed tinge to it. "Can you please do that for me?"

"I am in my car, I don't have access to that type of information!"

"Yes, you do. You're in on the tactical, you know which aircrafts did not get called in for this. They sent all the big guns, but I just need a chopper."

There was silence. "Why?" was all Kylie could say.

"You're wasting my time, Kylie. Don't ask stupid questions, just get me a fucking chopper." He sounded more desperate than ever, but seemed to be back to his usual insulting behavior for a moment. "Please!"

There was something in his voice that nearly broke her heart and then she understood. He was trying to get someone out – just as she was.

"Where are you?" she asked in a hushed voice.

"I am close to Glenbrook Base."

Glenbrook, Glenbrook, she remembered that base.

"Do you think you can get in?" Kylie had no idea what she could do for him once he was in, but it was hard to think about much else, as she was going at a speed much too fast for the old car and consequently swerving in every bend along the way. She had hit the curb in more than one occasion and almost lost control over the vehicle just a couple of minutes ago.

"Yeah!"

"Go to Hangar 29, it's a small hangar to the left of the main entrance. There used to be an OH-58D Kiowa right behind it, but I'll be honest with you, I haven't been to Glenbrook so I have no idea if it is still there or if it is filled up." There was silence on the other end.

"I am sorry, Hansen, that's all I can do." she said, her voice almost a whisper.

Knuckles white in stark contrast to the black leather of the steering wheel, Kylie steered the speeding car along Captain Cook Drive, trying to think ahead and decide which way would be shortest to get out of the bay. There were only two options, it was either taking the three lane road through Taren Point and cross over Captain Cook Bridge or the much smaller Port Hacking Road, which would lead her through the Sylvania Waters. The latter was much more direct but she suspected the narrow streets cluttered with abandoned cars but as she got closer, she realized that the route across the bridge would not take her anywhere. The monumental bridge was all but ruins.

Frustrated, she jammed the car in reverse and raced back to the intersection that would take her to Sylvania and to her relief, found it not as clogged as she had feared and once she reached Prices Highway, the going turned surprisingly smooth and fast.

The comm startled her and she almost lost control over the car, when Hansen came back on the line, loud engine noise surrounding him, about 15 minutes after they last talked. She had just passed Blackhurst.

"Towra Base, come in!"

"149, go for Towra." She responded quickly this time.

"Kylie, I got the chopper."

Whow, he was fast, she thought.

"I am going in. Is there anything else I need to know. Anything you can tell me?"

"Are you serious?" She almost laughed. "Apart from there being a Kaiju on the loose and a thermonuclear bomb on its way to blow a good part of the city into oblivion?"

"Cut the sarcasm and tell me what you know. Were there any updates?"

Kylie outright hated him in that moment. "You are not in charge to give me any orders, you hear me?" Her voice had raised a couple of notches. "I helped you get a chopper which will most likely cost us both our careers and you're still bossing me around. I don't know if you are aware of it, but everybody has family in the area and they are all trying to hopefully get them out on time. So it's not only you! Do you think that I am out here driving recklessly just for the fun of it?"

Once again he was silent, but the comm stayed live. "My wife and son…" His voice was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. It was the first time Kylie felt Hansen's hard macho-exterior slip away, he was human after all. "They are in different parts of the city, so I need to know the ETA of the bomb. Please, Kylie…"

Her heart broke a little and she took her eyes off the road to train them on the small clock in the middle console of the car. Under her breath, she calculated the time until impact, trying desperately to remember at what time the bomb was to be launched. She remembered that she left the compound approximately 5 minutes after the countdown of the drop was given and judging from the distance she had covered at the high speed she was going, she must have been on the road for about 9-10 minutes. This was nowhere near exact, so she preferred to err on the short side.

She swallowed hard. "I have no way of confirming the exact time, but I guess that it's been somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes. I didn't really have a profound look at the clock when Marshall Roberton gave the order, so I'd say that it might been even a little over 20 minutes." Her voice trembled, and she didn't care if he knew. Any human being with a working set of feelings would probably have theirs in the same tangled mess as herself.

"That's good enough for me!" he said, his own voice also not back to its normal hard tone. "Thank you, Kylie, you have no idea how much this means to me."

"Hansen! _NO_!" She shouted while hanging onto the steering wheel hard when she sped too hard into a bend. "You cannot go in just like that with that little amount of Intel! What if I'm wrong about the time? Please! You cannot go in like that! You just can't!" _WHAT ABOUT MY FAMILY? WHAT ABOUT MY CHILD?_ She wanted to yell at him. She wanted to tell him to go and also try and rescue her family so badly but the words just didn't come out. Whatever he was planning to do, he would probably die in the process anyway.

The snort was audible over the comm. "Watch me, precious!"

So that was that. Simple. "Good luck…" was all that she had left to say, and it came out broken and hoarse, while tears brimming in her eyes. She was sure that Hansen would perish in that undertaking she could only consider to be a suicide mission. It felt very much like saying goodbye. Absentmindedly, she drew the back of her hand across her eyes to wipe away the tears, sweat, and ultimately, the tension that was just too much to bear.

"Hansen!" she screamed again, hitting the curb hard. She had to swerve a gaping hole in the street, most likely caused by a stray missile that had hit the road and torn it open, but as she had not been entirely focused, her reactions were way too harsh. She hit the brakes hard as a last resort – what a stupid thing to do at over 70 mph/h – and skidded straight into a tree. Then the comm system went silent and the world faded into darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was only ever aware of the underlying pain – even if only slightly. It was like someone else's pain, like someone had written about it in a heart wrecking story and now was telling her about it, and she tried to feel it the way the author had intended. Nevertheless, her brain knew quite well that the pain was real, the pain was hers. Something bad had happened to her, she just couldn't wrap her mind around what that was.

Slowly, she opened her eyes, and had to squeeze them shut tight right away as bright light blinded her. Was that the sun? It had been a cloudy day so far, she remembered but then again, she wasn't really sure of anything. The light felt unnaturally bright and hurt her eyes like a blowtorch would if you looked right into the white flame, even though they were closed.

Her head was slanted backwards, wedged against the headrest and the upper rim of the back part of the seat so she wasn't looking outside, she was actually looking up against the ceiling of the car, so she couldn't figure out why the sun would be so bright inside the car. She also didn't know why she would be in such a position, something must have happened to the seat.

Everything – her entire body – hurt and she couldn't breathe deeply, something she would have loved to do to make the dizziness go away. Something was pressing hard against her chest but she just couldn't yet find the strength to lift her arms and find out what was causing it.

Her ears rang, but she thought she could make out the sound of a horn in the distance. Was there anyone around? Should she be calling for help? Yes or no – it basically meant the same to her, she just didn't care. And even if she tried, she couldn't even gather enough breath to utter a whisper.

Her head spun and her chest hurt and she felt warm sticky liquid – was that blood? – trickle down her forehead, itching. She sluggishly raised a hand to give it a scratch and holding her fingers in front of her eyes, she could finally say for sure that it was blood, coming from a nasty gash across her forehead, most likely from when her head had hit the dashboard.

She let her hand drop, only to find that the steering wheel was not where it was supposed to be. The force of impact had driven the column forward, and it was now squashed against her chest. Panic set in, and she tried to wriggle free – against better knowledge – which caused fireworks of pain shooting up from her ribcage. Wave after wave of nausea flooded through her, made her taste bile at the back of her throat. Then, ever so slowly, all the noise and all the pain dissipated into a weird sort of peaceful darkness.

When she opened her eyes again, her neck hurt from the weird posture she was in. Cautiously, she twisted her head into an upright position. It took her a moment to understand where she was and what she was looking at. There was a tower of black and red – smoke? – in the distance. She blinked several times until she was able to really focus on it and found that it had not only grown in size but also drastically changed shape. Had she blacked out again?

She obviously was inside a car, a totaled car, as far as she could tell from the hood crumpled up against the broken windshield and the smoke trailing up from in between. Her brain sounded all sorts of alarms alarm – smoke coming from the engine block was never a good thing to see. She could almost taste the fear in the back of her mouth but either way, there was not much she could have done anyway, stuck as she was.

There was the fragmented question of that even being her car but then again, who would have cared? Kylie wondered why her brain even had time to come up with that kind of stupid queries but it seemed as if it needed to fill those empty moments to not go insane. Why again was she in this car? On this road?

Trying as hard as she could, she had trouble piecing together the last couple of minutes – or hours. How long had she been here? Her eyes lazily wavered over the individual furrows in the hood of her car until she could see the tree she had impacted and wondered how badly injured she was, as she couldn't really feel much from the chest downward but blamed that mostly on the steering wheel which was crushing her sternum and made her blissfully numb, so she didn't really mind the huge mushroom cloud looming over the city.

The airbag had deployed and knocked her back and sideways, which was most likely why her head had been in that uncomfortable position. Now, it was dangling limply from the steering wheel that was disturbingly close to her chest, from what her languidly exploring hands could fathom.

Her eyes fell shut a couple of more times and she shook her head to lose the wooziness but very soon wished she hadn't. All out of the sudden, it all came back and her mind went from zero activity to haywire, being as analytical as ever, she tried hard to remember, to piece together what had happened. She looked around, moving her head cautiously as to not hurt herself any more to try and get her bearings straight, which turned out to be quite difficult as she again felt dizzy and nauseous.

The Kaiju, the thermonuclear bomb, her parents…the mushroom cloud.

The precipitous shock of realization made her want to sit up straight, brace herself for what she knew was to come as soon as the shock wore off, but she couldn't move at all – and that wasn't only because she was wedged in between the seat and the steering wheel, it was because all her energy had drained away, like her life force had been taken in the same way her parents and her daughter had been taken, burnt out of her. She dry-retched, hot tears feeling acidy in her eyes.

She had been driving towards Lindfield – to get her parents and Emma out of the danger zone – to save them. The fiery cloud she saw so clearly told her more than she wanted to know. The bomb had been deployed and had exploded – as intended, with most of what was left of Downtown blackened by the blast. Had it killed the Kaiju?

Through the cracked windscreen, the looming column of smoke and fire that had once been the thermonuclear bomb unleashed on the Kaiju looked distorted – almost comical, insignificant, not hazardous at all. Her frenzied brain almost expected the monster to jump out of it doing a funny dance, maybe even flipping everybody off. Did Kaiju even have middle fingers to do that? Her brain reveled in that thought a little longer, coming up with all sorts of weird images until her tired eyes closed, but the images that her mind was conjuring up didn't go away.

It was only when her whole body convulsed over a cough, which turned into dry retching that she felt her mind clear up a little more. There was the tangy taste of metal in her mouth and she saw thinly splattered bright red drops on her hands resting on the steering wheel. Passing her tongue along the inside of and over her lips, she couldn't find any major cut that would justify the amount of blood, so she carefully ran her fingers over her face. There were a few more cuts, apart from the big gash along her hairline but most of them had dried up or were in the process of doing so.

Her head reeled. Absentmindedly, she sucked in air through her nose after wiping it with the back of her hand. It was only then that she smelled the pungent gasoline mixed with the syrupy scent of brake fluid and motor oil. Flaring her nostrils and widening her eyes in shock, she tried to make out if there was still smoke coming from her car – which wasn't the case, thankfully.

Even though she was still way too far away to really tell, she just knew that Lindfield had been burnt into oblivion and with it her parents and Emma. The mushroom cloud was funneled over that general direction. The realization was too much for her to take, she just stared onwards blankly, drawing in labored breath after labored breath while silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

She didn't know how much time had passed since she had crashed the car, but it must have been at least half an hour. There was not much she knew about the bomb itself, so the stabilization period of the nuclear blast cloud could have taken anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, as it depended on bomb size and altitude of the blast above the ground, the type of material swept up by the blast from the ground, and atmospheric conditions like humidity, pressure, and wind speed. She didn't feel like going through mayor calculations here, however.

The mushroom stem and cap of the cloud was still black with fiery eruptions – she assumed by the obvious display of heat that the bomb had been quite loaded and had caused a single, high-yield nuclear detonation – but it wasn't growing anymore in height and seemed to be fraying around the lighter-colored edges, where it was being dispersed by the winds into the surrounding atmosphere, merging slowly with the clouds.

Had she been out for so long? Sure, it had been some sort of merciful that she didn't have to witness the blast itself, yet it didn't give her any comfort at all. All she knew was that she hadn't been able to get to them on time. She most likely would have died, that was for sure, there just hadn't been enough time to get in and out. Not enough time, not enough time, nobody in this had had enough time.

The comm link came back to life and startled her – lost in thoughts – back into reality and back into the pain with the loud static.

"Towra Base, come in!" she heard a way too familiar through the white noise, yet her banged-up head didn't compute. "Towra Base, come in!"

Without much energy and will, and almost automatically, she dropped her hand onto the passenger seat, which was where she thought the comm was, according to where she was hearing the noise from, patting listlessly up and down and around her body.

It took her a few moments to locate the earpiece dangling from the cable around her neck, and then some more to adjust the channel.

"Towra Base, come in!" How many times had she heard It sounded much like Hansen but honestly, she couldn't care any less about who was being so damn insistent. Why was anyone still on the comm? Who still cared about Towra Base? One thought, however, made her wrecked brain stop dead in its tracks. Did the airstrike go wrong? Did the bomb not kill the Kaiju? Did all those people die for absolutely nothing?

"Towra Base, come in!" It was Hansen, she was sure.

"What do you still want from me?" she blurted out weakly into the comm. "Leave me alone!"

"Kylie? Is that you?"

"Damn you, Hansen, you got what you wanted and I can see that you are still alive. Congratulations. Now leave me alone!"

Apparently, he suffered from selective hearing, as he blatantly ignored her request.

"Where are you? Are you alright?"

"You must be joking!" She laughed hysterically, despite the pain. "Alright? No, I AM NOT ALRIGHT!" Her voice had turned shrill. "I…I am not alright…" she added after a pause, sobbing quietly.

"Where are you?"

"What's it to you, anyways?" She was so tired, so ready to just give up and die. All she wanted to do was cease to exist.

"Tell me where you are!" Once again, his voice grew harsh. She knew that he wasn't going to take no for an answer and most likely insist until she was either dead or giving him the details of her whereabouts.

Kylie decided that the latter was most convenient as he might – hopefully – leave her alone after all. And even if he made it to her location to save her like a knight in shining armor – she had to chuckle through the pain – there wasn't much to go back to live for. One way or the other, it didn't really matter.

"I don't know where I am. All I know is that I am stuck in my car, which is stuck in a tree somewhere on A1. I haven't made it out of the Bay yet."

Something changed in his voice. "Are you hurt?"

"I…I guess so…" Suddenly she felt dizzy again, and very very tired. Breathing was hard, too. She coughed hard.

"Just sit tight!"

She coughed. "Funny you mention that…" but couldn't finish the sentence as she grew aware of the fact that she was coughing up blood. The pain in her chest exploded.

"I'm coming for you…"

Kylie didn't hear him anymore. Her head fell backwards against the headrest and she went unconscious one more time.


	5. Chapter 5

Kylie woke with a start when she felt someone – or was she just dreaming? She just couldn't be too sure – pulling at her, shaking her, shouting at her until she finally came to, with her arms unconvincingly flailing in a pathetic attempt to defend herself. What did it matter, though? The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the slowly dissipating mushroom cloud through the damaged windscreen, the frayed edges were much more discernible, but still, the sight of it towering menacingly over the explosion area made her wish she was dead. Her head still spun, it was like she couldn't remember a time it didn't.

There was a long string of incoherent swearwords in a tone of voice she felt she was very accustomed to, and some more tugging. She let her head loll sideways to see what was going on and saw a man – short-cropped blondish hair, face caked with grime and sweat, forehead in a frown, eyes an intense, piercing blue, brimming red with what seemed uncried tears, mouth set into a thin, determined line – trying to push back the steering wheel to free her. He gave it a couple of hard blows with one hand clenched into a fist, the other hand with the fingers splayed open across her chest to push her back into the seat. It took a good couple of blows until he was able to move it backwards and sideways a little to ease up on her chest. The he leant over her, reached around – almost crushing her in the attempt – to loosen the seatbelt, but couldn't, as the seat had twisted in the rails and was now covering the buckle entirely. He smelled of smoke and sweat, and desperation.

There were more swearwords – she almost had to laugh but then she saw him pull a knife from a pocket, the light reflecting briefly from the blade and her eyes widened in alarm. While looking at him questioningly, a quick wave of panic rushing through her, then she felt the pressure on her upper body receding. He had cut the seatbelt and was now, as carefully as possible, dragging her out through the window. Once he had her out, he sat her down with her back propped up against the driver side door of her car, kneeling in front of her to take her face into both of his hands.

Dumbfounded and way too dizzy, Kylie had trouble focusing her eyes on anything, unable to make any intelligible connections. But one thing seemed to be clear to her – the man in front of her was Hansen, damn him.

"Kylie!" He said, kneeling before her, his face hovering right in front of her but she found it hard to focus. "I need you to look at me!"

"Hmm…?" She wasn't able to think straight, less say anything coherent.

Herc shook her, not very gently. "Kylie!"

She must have blacked out again. "Kylie!" he said for a third time, and this time, she was able to look at him. He saw that her pupils were huge, and the noticeable delayed movement of her eyes told him that she had suffered head trauma, with any luck only a concussion, he hoped.

"It's me, Herc. Herc Hansen." he said hoarsely. Did she recognize him at all? He put one thumb under her chin to steady her head.

"Hansen… What do you still want from me?" She wailed. "I got you everything you wanted. You apparently got what you came for and that's that. Please just leave me alone!" She feebly tried to push away from him but his grip on her was strong.

"You're hurt, I just cannot ignore that!"

He suddenly had a tissue in his hand, and began dabbing it against her forehead. "Did you hit your head?" It was like stating the obvious, but Herc needed to know if she knew that had happened.

"Wha…?" She was becoming incoherent once more.

"Your head. You're bleeding…" Herc said, his voice husked over.

Kylie feebly lifted one hand to her head but he pushed it down.

"Sit still there for a minute, will you?" With deft moves, he wiped as much blood away as possible from the cut on her hairline, brow and her cheek while carefully holding her in place with the other hand under her chin. He didn't want her to move her head too much, judging from the type of crash, there must have been at least a little whiplash strain on her neck.

From time to time, his eyes darted up and looked into hers, frowning. Her pupils were still too big, the skin around her eyes almost translucent. She was in shock, obviously. He just hoped that the apparent concussion she had suffered wasn't that bad. He was much more worried about the blood that had crusted around the corners of her mouth and throat.

A coughing fit now shook her entire body and caused her head to spin again. She weakly lifted a hand in a feeble attempt to cover her mouth but lowered it almost immediately to look at it in disbelief when she felt a hot wet spray – blood. Herc saw it, too and knew that his worries were more than spot-on. The crash had been more than serious. She had was internal bleeding for sure, a tear in an organ or vessel, maybe even a punctured lung, and he realized that time was against them. Yet, the old military dog he was, he kept calm around her because she already was in shock and simply didn't need any more upsetting news.

Slowly, she was able to focus a little more. Her eyes steadied and she looked at him, seeing the pearls of sweat beading along his forehead, the deep frown crumpling the bridge of his nose and right above the upper lip. She watched – her sight still dragging – as he swiped his forearm across his face, repeatedly, to wipe the sweat away that must have been itching, maybe even burning in his eyes, yet she couldn't tell whether it was the sweat or the tears that made his bright blue eyes stand out so intensely. She also noted a fair amount of freckles on his dirty but otherwise pale face.

The next time their eyes met, he didn't look away, but she could tell that it made him uncomfortable, just like herself. There was this ambiguous intensity of simultaneous invasion and vulnerability in his gaze. Cocking his head sideways, he tried a little unconvinced smile. "I am sorry that I raised my voice at you over the comm." He muttered under his breath.

Kylie attempted to raise an eyebrow but failed miserably. "Oh well, and here I was thinking that you did that with all female personnel…" At least she could put some sarcasm into her voice.

Herc frowned and pulled away from her a little. There was outright concern all over his face. "No!" he exclaimed. "I don't usually do…that!" Then his face fell again. "I guess it was in the heat of the moment. I don't know…"

She studied him for a moment, he seemed genuine enough. "Why did you come back?" she asked out of the sudden. He looked at her, clearly confused.

"Why wouldn't I?" came his simple answer.

"Well…" she began but couldn't think of anything to say.

There was an awkward moment of silence.

"You helped me save my son, so the least I could do was try and find you." Herc had been kneeling before her and now changed position when he seemed content with the outcome of his ministrations. It was only then when Kylie saw the little boy standing a couple of feet away, staring at his feet, trembling in silence.

She briefly remembered what he had told her over the comm before, he had wanted to save both his son and wife. She swallowed hard. She realized – sadly though – that time had also not been on his side to accomplish the entire mission.

"That's my son, Chuck…" Herc said now, having followed her gaze. "Thank you for getting me the chopper and with it the chance to at least save him. I brought it back to Glenbrook, just so you know."

Kylie turned towards him, nodding, eyes brimming with tears. "Good for you…" she whispered but thought 'Who cares about the chopper?' to herself. She looked back at Chuck, who was now sitting on the curb, playing with his shoelaces. "Good for you…" She somehow wanted to be angry but couldn't didn't find the strength in her. "I would have loved to get my family out." She simply stated instead, shoulders slumped forward, head bent down.

Herc moved closer again, took her hand into his and squeezed it gently, while placing the other under her chin to make her look at him. She thought he might say something, but he kept quiet. His eyes, however, seemed to look deeply into her soul, making her come undone.

"I…I…" she couldn't hold back the tears anymore. "I couldn't get to them fast enough. I couldn't get my baby out…" She broke down in his arms.

He was silent for a moment and simply pulled her into an embrace, hugging her tight. "Where were they?"

Kylie breathed against his chest, trying to get a grip on herself. "Lindfield…" she said and pushed away from him, clearing her throat. "Even if I hadn't wrecked the car, I wouldn't have probably made it back out anyways."

"I am sorry…" Herc's hands fell to his side and he looked much smaller than he actually was. "There wasn't enough time…" He didn't need to go on, Kylie understood. She leaned back into his arms and they sat quietly for a moment or two. Lindfield had been in close proximity to Garigal National Park, too close for anyone to make believe that there were survivors of the nuclear blast or the radiation wave.

Looking over at Chuck, she smiled a lopsided smile. "You know…when you told me that you wanted to take the chopper and get your family out, I was so angry with you because you…you went out there to get your family and I couldn't and all I wanted was to scream at you to try and get my family out as well. I know I was wrong to wish for that, it was already way too late, but I wanted you to at least try, I wanted it so bad because I had already failed them."

Herc just held her, he didn't know what else to do.

"I know that it would have killed all of you, I know that!" She continued as she sobbed against his shoulder. "I just…I wanted someone to help them, too. I wanted…because I couldn't…" That was the moment she broke down completely. He pressed her against his chest, feeling how hard her heart beat, how the sobbing shook her body, how her tears wet his shirt. He felt so sorry for her, even more than he felt sorry for himself, but he didn't know how to put it into words. He wanted her to know that none of this was her fault, but he didn't' know how. He decided it was better not to speak at all.

They just sat there, for what felt like an eternity, even though Herc knew very well that time was critical here. Kylie had suffered injuries that needed treatment, urgent treatment if his initial diagnosis was right.

"Can we go home now?" Chuck's small whiny voice pulled them out of their reverie and Herc got to his feet a little too quick, clearing his throat.

"We will need to find someplace else to sleep for now, little man." Herc said with an unusually comforting voice as he stood up. The kid must have gone through the first circle of hell before his father had come and rescued him from the school. How did he get him out, anyway? Schools had quite an extensive security protocol, especially when there were catastrophes about to happen.

Kylie struggled to get to her feet as well. There was more pain in her body now, a lot more pain, but her head was clearer. She guessed that the shock was still having a strong hold of her but at least she was able to form coherent phrases when she now asked: "Tell me one thing at least…is the Kaiju dead?" She felt ridiculous just for asking, as it mattered next to none to her.

"Yeah, they got the bastard." Herc was brief in his answer. Kylie saw his face tighten up.

It was only then Kylie saw the extent of damage the impact had inflicted on her faithful Holden Commodore. Every fiber in her body screamed that she could have easily been killed. The tree was incrusted way past the engine block – how, she didn't know – and parts of the radiator, the battery and a lot of wiring and tubing were scattered all around. The front tires had folded inwards and it looked like the back of her car had slightly bent up, giving the car the shape of a somewhat mashed banana.

There was a lot of liquid pooling around the tires underneath the car, some it oil, some coolant and some gasoline. Those at least she was able to distinguish by their liquescence, color and smell. She faintly remembered having seen smoke when she first had come to. Now, cars usually don't go up in flames so easily, that just happened in movies, but usually the engine was hot at impact and there were a number of highly flammable fluids that could easily ignite. She was lucky, she guessed. Cars traveling at a high velocity slamming into hard and motionless objects weren't really designed to prevent such violent ends. While engine ejections and explosions weren't necessarily the norm, they weren't as rare as most would guess.

"Thanks to the modern car industry for crumple zones, eh?" she tried to joke but the look that Herc shot her indicated that he wasn't finding any of this funny.

"Yeah, you can be happy that it was a square frontal impact and not off-set and that the airbag deployed." He took Chuck by the hand, the boy let himself be dragged forward and fell into movement next to his father. Kylie moved along, too.

Once Herc had made sure of her being ok to walk – even though he was sure that she had suffered some serious injuries in the crash, just by judging the state of the car – he turned the radio back on. He had disconnected it when he had found Kylie. There were constant emergency messages, advising people what to do and where to go. Herc lead them towards Kingsgrove, which apparently was the Rescue Shelter closest to them – at least that was what he said.

Kylie swayed as she walked, her sense of balance was off. In fight-or-flight mode, the adrenaline released into her system would create some pretty awesome short term side effects like oxygenating muscles to make them work longer without fatigue but that had worn off quite a while ago. She was exhausted and from time to time, she felt that she would even faint. Luckily for her, she knew that this was not going to happen until her body felt she was out of danger entirely.

However, it was quite a long walk and Katie grew tired quickly. She lagged behind and Herc had to help her push through several times and finally ended up almost dragging her along, one arm around her waist. With the other, he was holding on to Chuck, as if his life depended on it.

In her blurry state of mind, Kylie noticed that the sullen boy never asked for his mother and it seemed weird to her that he wouldn't. Now, she didn't know how much information Herc had shared with his son but she felt that the young boy knew more than he showed. She felt quite a lot of hostility emanating from him, but couldn't quite place it, believing it was due to the shock and all. All of this was difficult for her as an adult – knowing fair well what had gone down and what the consequences were - and she could only begin to imagine how it must have been like for a little boy who, most likely, had no idea what all of this really meant.

Lost in thought and pain, constantly steadied by Herc with a secure arm around her, they finally arrived in Kingsgrove.


	6. Chapter 6

[notes: thanks to Reaper Nanashi, who dedicated her time and creativity to helping me get a little more descriptive power into this. So…hope you like it.]

* * *

At the Kingsgrove shelter, all three were immediately checked out and assessed by a triage officer. While both Herc and Chuck were treated for dehydration, Kylie was considered Emergency Red Priority 1 and seen by medical staff right away. Before Herc could get a hold of her, she was put into a helicopter and flown out to Camden Hospital, as all the nearer hospitals were already flooded with patients.

Herc and Chuck remained at Kingsgrove, together with thousands of others who had lost everything in the attack. Once released from medical attention, Herc left Chuck with the nurses, he didn't think it was a good idea to drag him around, he had been through so much already. And what Herc had to do next was not any better than what Chuck had already witnessed.

He had never been the type to take the long road and so he simply brushed through the crowd that had gathered in front of the communications tent, waiting for updates on missing persons. There were long lists published on the bulletin board left of the entrance to the tent and Herc stopped to browse through them. Each shelter would communicate all arrivals to all the other shelters so that split up families would be able to find relatives. His wife's name was not on there and that smallest of hopes of Angela even being alive still faded away. He could not be sure after until he saw her body but as he had so rightly pointed out to Kylie, nobody could have survived the nuclear bomb. Still, he approached the personnel to ask but all he got as a reply was to keep checking the lists as updates came in every five minutes.

Unsatisfied with the answer – knowing fair well that everybody would receive the same response and that he was not any more important than all the other people who were looking for their relatives – Herc stomped off to find the officer in charge to turn himself in for insubordination and theft of military property. He was a very principled man, and even though he had set himself above the law when he unlawfully, even though only temporarily acquired the chopper, he sought to be dealt with accordingly. The officer in charge, Colonel Ferguson, however didn't feel the necessity to deal with Herc at all. He listened rather impatiently to Herc's matter-of-fact but still circumlocutory explanations – careful to not expose Kylie any more than necessary, he hated the thought of her getting into trouble over helping him out – and finally dismissed him with a "Duly noted, it will be addressed and handled later on."

Herc walked back to where his son was waiting. He felt a little light-headed and dizzy but blamed it on the adrenaline rush that had finally depleted. Something deep inside told that Angela had perished in the attack, her office had been too close to the impact zone of the nuclear bomb. Saint Ives, or what was left of it now, bordered Garigal National Part towards the west – way too close, the explosion or the radiation would have vaporized most of the surrounding area.

Pushing into the nurses' tent, he caught himself hesitating in his tracks when he saw Chuck sitting on a makeshift stretcher in the far corner of the tent, pale in his dirty dark blue shirt, sullenly staring into nothingness. The realization that this boy had just lost his mother because of the incompetence of his father nearly broke his heart. He had failed them both. In that very moment, Herc wanted to disappear from the face of the Earth.

It must have been at least a couple of moments he had stood there until Chuck realized that his dad had returned. A sad smile lit up his small face when he got up from where he was sitting and walked across the room to wrap his arms around Herc and it was then that Herc made the silent promise to not let him down another time – ever again.

"I want mom…" the boy said and Herc had to bite back the tears.

"I want mom, too…" he whispered into his son's hair while he told himself that he would not rest until he had found Angela – dead or alive. He would scour every shelter list, every hospital, every military register. He would not leave a single stone unturned until he could be more than absolutely certain of her fate.

* * *

Kylie arrived at Camden Hospital together with four other people, two of them being victims of car crashes like herself, one who had been rescued from a collapsing buildings and one got injured during a reckless stunt which resulted in a broken spine – the man had tried to hold off the Kaiju on his own, and had a bus thrown at him. The paramedic staff of the helicopter had run out of painkillers, so the level of moaning was quite intense. Kylie herself was in pain but the shock was still too present, or maybe it was because she simply didn't want to be alive that she wasn't feeling the pain she should have been feeling.

She had asked several times over – the triage officers and the paramedic staff – if there was any way to finding out if her family had survived but when she mentioned the region, they had only looked at her sadly.

Two of the patients had died during the 25 minutes of flight, the young and reckless man was one of them. The other was an elderly woman with a broken arm who had suffered two heart attacks during transport. The accompanying paramedics had done their best to keep their passing a secret but Kylie could tell from the desperate look on their faces once they ceased CPR that they had not been able to save their patients. It was quieter after that – Kylie hated herself for even thinking that.

The helicopter set down on a field next to the hospital parking lot – which was already packed with ambulances, fire engines and police cars – and Kylie was lifted out of the cabin and wheeled across towards the main entrance. She wanted to tell the men pushing her stretcher to be more careful as the ride was bumpy but kept quiet, their stressed out faces told her more than she cared to know.

There were even more ambulances, police cars and privately owned cars blocking the entrance and there were constantly coming and going more, bringing in casualties. Kylie could only imagine how it would be like inside the building. Sydney had never suffered a calamity of that proportion ever before and she silently prayed that at least someone inside had gotten a grip on things but from what she could see, this was not the case. Everybody outside, police, firefighters and medical staff were frantically working in the triage funnel they had created to better control all incoming units to identify the injured from people who had come to find family members, and those with catastrophic prognosis from those critically wounded with urgent need of treatment and surgery. It escaped her how anyone could even determine who needed more help and who needed less, but she witnessed a young girl on a stretcher – at least Kylie thought that it was a young girl, her body was almost entirely charred and blistered – being pushed over to a nurse who only nodded sadly at the doctor's dull 'no chance'.

Kylie was quickly examined and re-tagged, and then wheeled through the ER, past several automatic sliding doors and into an immeasurable hustle and bustle among the people, patients, nurses and surgeons alike. Even though the hospital personnel made every effort to organize themselves, the large number of people that kept on streaming in every minute presented a challenge – as did the lack of space.

Just like each hospital in the city, Camden was on mass casualty protocol, the focus was on the patients that actually had a chance to survive, an automatic non-resuscitation order was put on any patient. The med bays were overcrowded with up to four patients sharing a ventilator, patients were treated in the hallways, the waiting area and even in the cafeteria.

She was pushed along the many rows of beat-up chairs filled with people who had all sorts of injuries, but most were severe, as far as Kylie could determine in her blurry state of mind. Adults and children alike were either screaming in pain, sobbing or silent and trembling in their shock, largely untended due to the nurses and doctors being occupied with the most severe cases, and left to their own private hells because they had no serious physical injuries.

Kylie ended up being placed against a wall at the far end of the general admissions hall at the end of what seemed a long line of stretchers– all waiting for examination with one nurse constantly circulating from one end to the other to check on each person and make them feel as comfortable as possible while they were waiting for treatment. She began to notice an intense reek, odors of burned meat and blood mixed with urine and feces as the hysterical and dying lost control of their bowels.

She saw people with parts of their bodies charred black – just like the girl that had been left outside but apparently the ones in this line had been determined with better chances of survival – people with parts of their bodies missing entirely or crushed or twisted the wrong way. Many others, mostly with no or only slight injuries, were clinging to some patients on the stretchers, crying or praying. It made her sick to the stomach to having to witness the constant influx of people with severe burns and wounds caused by debris or ensuing accidents being brought into the ER, many of them children, and it was heart wrenching to see the parents pray for them to survive. Many would not, Kylie was sure.

Like Emma… Maybe, only maybe, it had been mercifully quick and painless. Hopefully Emma hadn´t even realized what was going on, but then again, what would that change? Nothing much. She was dead, as were her parents, and she was surprised at herself that she could accept that fact without too much inner commotion.

Losing a child was always one of the most horrific things to experience one could think of, much worse than losing a sibling, a parent or a friend. And Kylie now knew why. In more lucid moment, she would wreck her brains about how much of a joy Emma had been, how little she had seen from the world and how much there was left undiscovered. She would reminisce about not having been a good mother – after all, she had gone to work instead of staying with her family during the Kaiju attack – about how all of this most likely was her fault, about how she had not tried hard enough to save them.

She felt as though her mind wanted to slap her brain in a feeble attempt to shut it down, as she very well knew that all those thoughts were pointless. She was not to blame for anything. She did not make the Kaiju appear and attack Sydney, she did not order the military to chase the creature into Garigal National Park nor had she been the one giving the order to fire a nuclear missile into a densely populated area. All she had done was her job to help ensure the safety of everybody else. Yet it was much easier to simply blame herself and reel in a deep puddle of self-pity.

When the next patient was lined up behind her – unfortunately right in her line of view – she had to close her eyes and turn her head. The man was lying on his stomach, apparently he had been running away from the nuclear blast or so the nurses whispered, with his back so severely blistered by radiation as his clothes had burned away and his flesh had begun to cook. Maybe it was still cooking, Kylie thought judging the smell that exuded from him. It made her dry retch. The man however was quiet and smiling vapidly, the doctors must have given him an arsenal of painkillers. He seemed to be absolutely oblivious to what had happened to him or what was going on around him. Kyle wished that she had been given some drugs, too.

The noise however was the worst, it reverberated in her head and made her nauseous. Even though she had her eyes squeezed shut tightly to keep out the horrible sight of injuries, she couldn't keep out the sound. Everybody around her – including herself – was in pain, there were groans, whimpers and some sporadic shrill shrieks with intermittent distressed coughing and wheezing, and there was continual screaming broken only when the sufferer struggled to take another breath.

Kylie tried to raise her hands to her head in the desperate need to cover her ears but it caused too much pain. Instead, she began to cry silently and hoped that someone would come for her to put her out of her misery, but that didn't happen. Time seemed to be standing still, and it felt like an eternity until a nurse softly touched her shoulder to let her know that it was her turn now.

She was wheeled around some more and finally pushed into a treatment booth that was being vacated while she came in – the middle-aged woman that had been treated there before had died from chemical burns from the toxic Kaiju blood, suffered while the injured monster had still been on the loose. The smell in the room was sickening, it was a mix of burnt plastic, rotten meat and sweat – the latter mostly from the doctors and nurses that had not stopped working since the attack had started three days ago. Absentmindedly, Kylie wondered about where they would leave all the dead bodies.

It was still loud around her, the closed doors didn't help much with keeping the noise out. She had expected a little more silence in here, kind of. After a few moments it felt as if the multitude of screaming, moaning, crying and choking was all she could hear. She saw the doctors move their mouths but didn't understand much of what they were saying. Instead, her mouth moved and incoherent words tumbled out – Emma, Lindfield, mom and dad were some of them. The nurse patted her head in a futile attempt to soothe the psychological pain away but then stopped, most likely realizing that it was of no use.

Without prior warning, she felt sick. Even though she was close to fainting, she somehow found the strength to throw up, emptying herself over the closest nurse who endured the ordeal without as much as raising a brow. She must have been through worse, Kylie thought. All she did was rip off the apron and pull on a new one, which she procured from a closet next to the door, together with a set of fresh gloves.

That very same nurse now pushed her back onto the stretcher with an understanding smile and proceeded to check her airways, set an IV drip and remove Kylie's clothes to check for injuries. Kylie followed her with her eyes and was only then able to understand the extent of the accident she had suffered. Starting from right above her left shoulder, a huge dark purple bruise had formed, spreading out across her chest and down to her right hip. The sight scared her even more than the pain she had been experiencing but slowly, everything began to feel as if it were far away. The pain, psychological and physical, became a dull shadow and somehow turned into a memory, and even her fear slowly dissipated.

The doctor – Dr. Sloane by the name tag, a bald scrawny man with a frown so deeply edged into his forehead, Kylie thought that it had come to stay for good – appeared behind the nurse and explained that she had been given strong painkillers and that they would now examine her. He also wants to know what exactly had happened to her. Slurring in her speech, Kylie tried to put into chronological order what she remembered of the crash. Dr. Sloane insisted on an accurate description of tiny details such as speed and angle at impact and Kylie thought that he was being hilariously meticulous. Man, those drugs they had given her were awesome, it was as if she was floating on a cloud with the Care Bears.

A handful of x-rays and echographies later, he diagnosed her with a ruptured spleen, 6 broken ribs that had caused a tear and bleeding in her left lung, a minor concussion, a broken collarbone and a sprained wrist. Nothing much, she thought, in comparison to what you would expect just imagining the velocity at impacting a motionless tree and the extent of damage to her car. Broken legs or hips were a usual consequence, broken noses and shattered orbital rims from the airbag or steering wheel, sometimes even serious and irreparable organ damage.

Sure, if she had clipped the tree rather than impacting it head on, it most likely would have killed her. The car's crumple zone was designed to proportionately deform upon impact to absorb the energy from a crash, reducing the degree of injury to passengers and the likelihood of death from injury. Generally, the longer the front of the car – and her Holden Commodore had quite a long snout – the slower the car decelerated in a frontal accident, and the longer the slow-down period, the better for passengers and drivers. But when only a small percentage of the front of the car hit the stationary object, only a fraction of the crumple zone was left to absorb the impact, and deceleration time decreases in milliseconds, which usually was the arbiter of life and death. Almost instantaneous rotation would set in after contact, moving occupants rapidly to the side as well as forward. Rotation makes you miss the airbag. Why was she actually spending energy on thoughts like that? The drugs were making her light headed and she had no willpower to stop her brain from reminiscing about the most stupid things – like crash test statistics.

The doctors were surprised that she had actually been able to walk the 9 km from the place of accident to the Kingsgrove shelter. Yet she knew that she was only alive because of Herc. Herc had come for her, Herc had saved her. He could have just taken his son and wallow in despair – pretty much what she was doing now – but he had come to save her. A fleeting thought of how he was doing crossed her mind, but couldn't get any deeper into it as Dr. Sloane began prepping her for surgery. The anesthesia took over almost immediately.

* * *

She woke up with difficulties breathing and she now really wished she could just die. The swishing sound of the ventilator didn't help much. The pain might not have been as excruciating as before but the intubation tube down her throat and the incapability to breathe in deeply had her on the verge of desperatation. She clawed at the machinery taped over her mouth and set off an alarm. Feeling all the cables attached to and tubes going into her arms didn't help either, but suddenly a nurse appeared in front of her, gently pushing Kylie back down onto the led, pulling at her arms, pinning them down.

"It's ok, Ms. McLeod, you just had surgery! I need you to lie still and not fight the intubation tube, you might hurt yourself. I will call the doctor so that he can take it out now that you seem to be breathing well on your own." She pressed a button next to the bed and smiled benevolently at Kylie's questioning face. "Try not to speak!" She warned softly. "The anesthesia didn't sit well with you, we had to connect you to a ventilator to up the oxygen levels in your blood. But it seems that you are saturating well now. The important thing is that you are awake. It's been over 24 hours…" The nurse seemed sincerely worried and Kylie heeded her word. The woman in white pushed some remedies from a syringe into one of the tubes that lead into her arms – painkillers, Kylie thought when a warming numbness quickly spread through her veins and clouded her mind.

The doctor, a different doctor, not Dr. Sloane, came – over an hour later but Kylie did not insist. She could imagine the amount of patients that needed tending and right now she wasn't a top priority. She used the time to get her bearings straight. She was in a white room with a window to the left, together with 5 other patients, hospital bed against hospital bed with only the smallest space left for the medical staff to walk around. The room must have once been a double suite, there was a panel of plugs on each side but now the 6 occupants were sharing the appliances in trios.

The antiseptic smell was much stronger now, but still couldn't really drown out the smell of decay. Kylie didn't care much, the painkillers had her nicely dazed, but it was bothersome to some degree. Just like the emergency room, the hospital mortuary was not equipped enough to deal with the amount of dead people, and the point had been reached where the stink of decay – either from the corpses stacked against the walls of the hospital mortuary or the rotting of un- and undertreated injuries or both – was occupying most of the air in the building.

One of the other patients – the one in the bed opposite of hers – was burnt and disfigured beyond recognition by what she thought to be the acid released by the Kaiju but according to the machine monitoring the vital signs that person was alive.

The smell that radiated from him or her however was irritating. If she had been in a clearer state of mind, it would most likely have made her throw up.

In the bed next to her was a man whose shallow and labored breathing reminded her of how she must have sounded. He had a blank expression on his face, but his eyes that were tied to the small TV screen above the door betrayed his calm, they were full of terror. Kylie had to twist her head to the side to be able to see what he was seeing that had made him so petrified.

The news were on, in silent mode, and it was only then she understood the full extent of the damage caused by the Kaiju. Much of the coastline from Manly Beach to Mona Vale was destroyed, Harbour Bridge was badly bleached by the blast and the wing of the Sydney Opera House that contained the Opera Theatre had collapsed. The rest of the once majestic structure looked like it would pretty much cave in on itself any second. From there on, North Sydney pretty much had disappeared, all that was left were smoking ruins.

It was devastating to watch. Lindfield was one of the completely destroyed areas with what the anchorman made out to be a zero possibility of finding any survivors. Kylie knew better than to keep her hopes up. Well, they hadn't been high up anyways as she knew about the magnitude of the nuclear missile impact. She had seen the bright explosion right before she had passed out again, trapped in her car. Lindfield and the surrounding areas of Garigal National Park had been lit up like the US 4th of July fireworks she would always watch on TV.

One shaky video showed the carcass of the monster, hundreds of scientists were already swarming the place, on the mission of containing the Kaiju Blue. Kaiju Blue was bad news, it caused a kind of shock reaction the human body suffered when recently dead kaiju started to off-gas toxins in the hours after they died. It was highly toxic, contaminating the environment immediately after decomposition set in, its blood became a vapor – the anchorman referred to it as blood mist, a term coined by something called K-Science division – that spread throughout the city and had already killed a lot of people in the aftermath of the other three attacks in California, Manila and Cabo.

Apart from the damage done by the monster, fallout was a major concern. Fallout was the mess of bomb material, soil, and debris that had been vaporized and made radioactive, that now sprinkled as dust and ash across the land. The late September coastal winds spread the dangerous particles even more. Radiation could kill you in a variety of ways, and none of them were particularly quick or painless. Victims – either dead or alive, Kylie wasn't sure which was worse – would be brought in for the next couple of weeks.

She had to close her eyes and leant back into the pillows, so that she wouldn't have to see the TV screen anymore. Thankfully, the doctor came soon after to free her from the tube down her throat.


	7. Chapter 7

Kylie was sent home only 4 days later, as soon as she was physically stable – mentally, she was a wreck – with the indications to see a physician closer to her home for checkups and bandage dressing. She was also to come in for psychological evaluation, as was mandatory for military personnel after suffering a personal loss. One of the hospital's psychologists was supposed to have come by but never showed up. Kylie thought that they had other urgent cases to take care of, like one of the women she had shared a room with. She had tried to commit suicide right there in the admissions lounge after finding out that her husband and four children who had come in with her had not made it. Kylie could somewhat relate but there was not enough energy in her body and mind to even think about killing herself – not even close. She was lethargic and apathetic, her brain empty and numb. It wasn't like she didn't care; she simply couldn't care even if she wanted to.

The stitches right under the ribcage on the upper left side of her abdomen were healing nicely and the bruises were changing color accordingly. The medical personal decided that it was enough to begin moving and since there wasn't really any space to move around as there were patients packed everywhere, she was told that she should go home as soon as the doctor determined it was reasonable to discharge her from urgent medical care.

They needed the space, the nice nurse said, there were a lot of people in much worse condition waiting for a bed. Even though the Kaiju had been brought down four days ago, there was still a constant – both in numbers and in severity of injuries – influx of wounded people, mostly victims of radiation and rescued from collapsed buildings.

Kylie understood. Of course she understood. In times of catastrophe, there were never enough medical services available. Tens of thousands of people were injured, many of them critically, and she was not a priority anymore. She had seen it first hand during her stay at the hospital, where people had been labelled by their chances of survival. Most likely, many more would die within the next couple of days, weeks or months. Radiation was real bitch. She also understood why she didn't care. Her mind had gone into full-blown protection mode and had apparently detached itself from the world. The numbness that fogged her brain was comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time and she couldn't decide whether it was a good or a bad thing.

The nice nurse called her a cab to take her home and then sent her off with a large bag of pills, the corresponding instructions and what was left of her personal belongings, which wasn't any more than the clothes that had been cut off her body. And the moment she stepped foot outside the hospital, she was on her own.

The taxi dropped her off in front of four-story apartment building she once had called home. Kylie felt like she was going to be sick again but forced herself to push through it to get out of the car, and she just stood on the curb even after the car had taken off. There was no electricity in the usually colorfully illuminated block, the streets were dark and so were the windows, even though she could hear emergency generators drumming away in the distance.

She shivered and realized only then that the hospital gown and thin cardigan she had been given at the hospital wasn't anywhere near suitable to shield her from the cool September night winds. She swallowed hard, absentmindedly playing with the key in her hand, then took another couple of steps towards the door and let herself in.

* * *

Nothing much seemed to matter for the next couple of days. Kylie had simply sat down on the sofa – which was the only thing she could bring herself to do after letting herself in to her apartment – and stared out of the large beau-window into the garden. Her apartment was a small sized two-bedroom standard at floor level with access to a small green area, as she had wanted only the best for her little baby, but now all she saw were dark shadows chasing each other on the dried up grass.

She could hardly breathe, her apartment smelled of what now were mere memories – baby cream, baby soap, baby shampoo. It was almost as if she were breathing in the warmth from her baby's head as she had done so many times over and could discern each individual scent. Everything inside here reminded her of her little daughter and her parents. Even though it was dark, she could make out the framed pictures hanging on the walls, most of them being pictures of trips they had all taken together. There were some images of Kylie and her parents from when she was a baby herself, others form when she was pregnant – she had only recently put up some new images from the last family trip to Europe in early June.

She faintly remembered that she had cried the first couple of hours until her face burnt and her eyes could not muster up any more tears and she could tell that she was suffering from the first signs of dehydration – the headache and the dizziness was unmistakable. She had also not taken either the prescribed painkillers nor antibiotics and she was beginning to feel the consequences, even through this heavy haze she was in.

The dreams she had whenever she came close to what could be considered a fitful sleep were atrocious. They all began with a flash brighter than the sun. Everything in the immediate surroundings, trees, fences, and people instantly caught fire. And then Kylie's overly pained and overly stressed brain began to diverge into all sorts of scenarios. In some sequences, she could see her parents – faceless, yet Kylie knew – diving in the cast-iron tub just as the shock waves arrived, her mother clutching the also faceless baby to her chest, placing one last kiss onto her tiny forehead before they all turned to ashes. Another version showed them getting back out of the tub scared but unharmed, stumbling to the front door, looking out on the burning ruin of their neighborhood. The deadly radioactive fallout was on its way and they were contemplating to run across town to the public library to shelter in its basement right before the massive house came down on them.

In some dreams, Kylie would be immediately devastated seeing how her family perished, in others she could actually feel her hopes getting up when she saw that they had survived the initial blast and actually getting away – or so it seemed – only to have them crushed because in the end, they always ended up dead. Her brain fussed so much about the possible ways of how they had died that in the end, she wasn't able to tell truth from hallucination. Yet she couldn't really stop herself from getting deeper and deeper into the frenzy that was trying to understand what had happened. Her overly analytical brain had lost all its realistic and logical approach, going through all the possible scenarios, trying to figure out every last detail. If she had been a little more in control, she would most likely have tried to not hand herself over so easily – but she couldn't stop. It somehow felt good to hurt so much.

Kylie didn't want to be alive, yet she didn't know how to make it all end. Eventually, thirst and hunger were too overwhelming to ignore and from then on, she functioned entirely on autopilot when it came to routines. She ate – but not enough and not too healthy, and it began to show quickly on her already skinny frame but even more so on her face –, slept and ran the errands she was told to run, like attending the mandatory medical checkups, but it didn't feel that she was actually aware of what she did. She just did what she was supposed to do, mostly completely numbed due to the many and strong painkillers she was taking – and she was thankful for them. She was able to sleep and actually get some rest even through those constantly recurring dreams. It seemed much more convenient to not think at all rather than have her brain tie her mind down to thoughts only about how she had screwed up saving her family.

She would, however, attend the scheduled doctor's appointments and once those were over and done with and the doctors were happy with her healing process, she was sent to a RAAF psychiatrist to help her get over the trauma – as if it were that easy. The woman who was assigned to her seemed nice and gentle enough but Kylie felt absolutely no inspiration to share what was eating away inside of her.

The psychiatrist started every session by asking how she was doing.

"Fine." Was the usual, listless answer.

The initial conversation would be quite casual for a couple of minutes with meaningless questions and meaningless replies, but after a while, the psychiatrist would try to coax Kylie into telling how it all had gone down, starting from when she had left for work when the Kaiju began its vicious attack to how she was coping with everything now – it was the same procedure in every single meeting. Of course, it was her job, and then again, she obviously wanted Kylie to be fine. It was just that Kylie didn't feel like wanting to be fine. She just wanted to be left alone in her grieving state of self-pitying. Yet, the counsellor was relentlessly probing.

"So tell me how your day's been going?" What a stupid question to ask, Kylie thought every time the counselor asked. It must have been quite clearly written on her face how 'well' she was doing.

"Is it those dreams again?" The woman sitting opposite to her asked gently. In a weak moment a couple of sessions ago, Kylie had let slip that she was experiencing bad dreams – the understatement of the year – to see if she could do something about it but all that came out of it was the counsellor trying to analyze those dreams and obviously, Kylie had no interest in going any deeper into them than she already was.

"I don't really remember much. I guess the brain has a funny way of dealing with trauma..." she would usually say to make her stop asking and the psychiatrist would not insist, she would only begin to scribble in her little black book. But Kylie did remember. She remembered kissing her daughter and her parents goodbye when she left for work during the Kaiju attack even though it had been a day off for her. She remembered the disgust she felt when she saw her coworkers leaving little by little but now only too well understood the reason behind it. She remembered the despair she felt when the nuclear airstrike was declared on the third day and the absolute desolation and hopelessness when she woke up from the car crash after the bomb had detonated. She even remembered the bickering with Hansen.

The one thing however – ironically – that she remembered best was the car crash. She could still feel the impact, how her lungs had contracted with such force that she had been afraid they would fold into themselves. There had been a sickening backwards press into the seat, and then another that left her weightless for a second before she was slammed into the opposite side with what felt like more G's than a human body could handle. Her torso and head had smashed up against the airbag with such force that she could feel the steering wheel underneath, while her arms and legs were flailing, searching for somewhere to hold and stop the forward movement her body was going. The world must have kept flickering its figurative light switch because her vision had kept flashing from bitter darkness to blinding white light. The only sound that had filled her ears was the crushing of glass and the screeching of metal as the car folded back into itself.

In that moment, she had assumed she was dead. But then she had kept waking and waking. She would have liked to be unconscious rather than awake, because when she had been awake she could taste the coppery blood pooling in her mouth, she could feel it grazing her teeth and soaking her tongue. She had sucked in cramped air, feeling her lungs caving in on themselves and it had felt like she was there for hours, fading and waking and fading and waking.

And then, she remembered Hansen pulling her out of the car. She remembered that deeply worried look in his eyes, that frown that had seemed so deeply etched into his forehead and that had never left his face. She remembered the strain in his voice to sound calm, when he talked to her or his son to make them believe that everything was going to be ok on the long walk to the camp.

But she didn't feel like sharing any of this with the counsellor. So she just sat, looked at her intertwined hands in her lap and listened to the good advice the counsellor gave, nodding when she felt like the counsellor was expecting a reaction from her side. Kylie almost pitied the woman, but no more than she pitied herself.

And then, Kylie would go home – returning to her self-inflicted prison almost as if she were sleepwalking – and sit back down on the couch, staring out of the window.


	8. Chapter 8

September 30th 2014, Sidney, Australia

She woke up with a start, sweating, shaking, too desperate to breathe. It took her a moment to find her bearings in the pitch-black room, and with unsteady hands she reached over and turned on the light. Her chest was heavy and her breath came ragged and when she looked down at her hands, she could see how hard they were gripping the blanket. Her knuckles were white and the sinews on her wrists and arms stood out. She seemed to be holding onto the blanket for dear life. Her body was stiff and ached – the position she had fallen asleep in mustn't have been comfortable.

Kylie felt like she was drowning, suffocating, like there wasn't enough air around her. Her throat was shut tight, she felt her eyes bulge out and in her panicked state, she couldn't think of anything better to do than jump up, make for the door and run, just run. She didn't care about leaving the door to her apartment wide open, she didn't care about running on the street with nothing more than a tank top, sweatpants and socks on in the middle of the night or who might see her, all she cared about was that slight chance of escaping that massive force that was caving in on her, threatening to crush and bury her.

She ran hard and fast on that one last breath that she thought she had left, her socked feet making quick little slapping sounds against the wet concrete – there was a slow but steady drizzle – until her legs gave out under her and she fell to her hands and knees. Air came rushing back into her lungs, replacing the feeling of suffocating, and she felt as if she had just come up from having been under water for far too long. The first couple of breaths came ragged, painful, desperate but soon, they mixed with tears that she thought she didn't have any more began to stream freely from her eyes, blurring her vision as she now pressed her forehead against the cold pavement.

And then she just screamed. It started as the most distressing howl deep in her chest – which felt like it was on fire and going to explode any second – and broke through, resonating in her body and soul. She screamed out all the pain, the agony, the misery she had been in for such a long time. She screamed and screamed – at the world, at the pain, at herself.

She didn't have any recollection of how long she sat there in the middle of the street, but when she finally picked herself back up, the night was not as dark as it had been when she had left the house.

All wet and terribly worn out, she dragged herself upright and walked back to her apartment. She passed by the couch – her usual sleeping place – and crawled into her bed, finally falling asleep and sleeping through to the morning without any disturbing dreams.

The next morning, everything felt different. Her sleep had been deeper and replenishing, to say the least. She actually felt better when she woke up, more energetic and a maybe even little more connected to the world.

For a moment, she would just lay there, feeling the soft but cool sheets against her skin, staring up against the ceiling. It was as if the next step took convincing or thorough thought, and Kylie spent a long time contemplating her choices. In the end, she got up and walked over into the bathroom, where she stopped in front of the sink. She placed both hands against the cold ceramic and breathed in with her eyes closed, slowly lifting her head towards the mirror. When she finally managed to look at herself, she was scared at what she saw.

With her skin translucent and saggy around the edges, huge dark bags under her eyes, a deep frown edged into her forehead and on top of the bridge of her nose, her lips thin and colorless, her honey brown eyes stood out in stark contrast, looking even darker. Her grip tightened on the sides of the sink, realizing that she needed to snap out of it, no matter how hard it seemed to be.

She took a long shower, lathered herself several times with soap, shampoo and conditioner – as if to wash away the past – dried herself and forced her still wet, light brown hair into something that resembled a ponytail and even found it in her to put on some basic make-up. Then she prepared herself a hearty breakfast, bacon, scrambled eggs, two English Muffins – even though she didn't feel hungry. She knew she was starved – she had near fasted for 20 days – but was far beyond the stage of feeling hunger. The appetite came while eating, though, and the more she ate the more she realized that she had not been taking care of herself at all during those last few weeks.

Once she was finished, she sat back in her chair, taking in her surroundings as if she were seeing it for the first time. There were dirty dishes piling up on the counter, food that she in one moment had prepared but couldn't muster to eat gone bad – thank God there was no bad smell just yet – and generally just chaos in her kitchen. She suddenly felt the urge to deep clean everything – disinfect, sterilize – as if it would do any good. She knew it wouldn't, but she also knew that she couldn't go on living in this pile of dirt. Her home, if you could still call it home, felt dark, cold and lonely.

Her glance travelled further down the dark cluttered hallway and came to a rest on the pink unicorn sticker on the door to Emma's room. Emma's empty room. While she looked at it, she felt as if the hallway stretched and the door moved farther and farther away, and her heart ached accordingly. She knew that Emma would not be coming back, ever, but right now, the emptiness that was in her heart did not hurt as much as it had before.

Slowly, she got up and walked towards the door, still feeling that it moved away but once her fingers closed around the handle and turned it, the world stood still entirely.

Hesitant, she pushed the door open and suddenly stood flooded in warm, golden sunlight. It made her feel at peace – as crazy as it sounded. It was as if the fuzzy warmth and the bright light that spilled from her dead baby daughter's room went directly into her bones to warm her core and lighten her heart.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, she felt much more rested and serene than she had just a few moments ago. As she moved forward, she let her hand travel along the rails of the bed, over the changing table, across the stuffed animals that decorated the low hanging book-shelves, and only allowed the good memories to come when she sat down on the pink duvet of the bed. The warm light was still on her when she breathed in and out calmly. After all these days she had lived in misery, she was finally able to find and collect herself.

It was funny, all this time she had thought that she could never again move freely through the apartment, let alone step foot into this room. Yet here she was, sitting on her daughter's bed with that soothing light on her face, and she felt at peace. She didn't believe in God, but this here had felt very much like a divine intervention. The pain had diminished, and with it the self-hatred and guilt.

She remembered the moment she found out she was pregnant. She hadn't planned to get knocked up, but things like that tend to happen even though you take precautions. He was a US Marine on shore leave for a couple of days, and you know what they say about sailors – one woman in every port – and they had fun for the time being. Nothing about their relationship was anywhere close to being serious and she had absolutely no intentions to turn it into anything serious. Neither did he because she never heard back from him after he returned to duty.

Nothing can actually prepare you for that type of news, especially when you weren't planning for a child. And yes, she was scared. She did not feel prepared to have a child, especially being a single mother, but her parents were supportive, as they had always been, and little by little, Kylie came to find that the growing entity within her actually filled her with peace and confidence.

Kylie didn't miss the father of her unborn baby at all, she decided to not even tell him that she was pregnant. It hadn't been that difficult, to be honest. Even though there had been mutual attraction, it hadn't been enough to create a deeper bond and he disappeared from her life soon enough. She had always been Little Miss Independent and there was no way she would be changing that any time soon.

Breaking the news to her boss, Air Vice Marshal Roberton, was a different story, though. She had only recently been promoted within the department of Air Control to lead the Joint Terminal Attack Control, and Roberton wasn't too happy to let her go, even for only a couple of months, understandably, but he had a family, too. He however made her promise to come back to the team. Kylie loved her job, she loved working with her team-mates and had come to realize that there was no better job for her out there. He was good as what she was doing, and Roberton knew that damn well.

She buried herself in work and preparations like changing her office/workout room into a nursery and time flew by. She took the legally corresponding 6 weeks of paid prenatal leave and would make use of the paid 14 weeks postnatal.

And then, the big day came – and the incredible pain of labor she thought would never go away was soon forgotten once she held that little creature in her arms. Emma, the name came on its own. She hadn't spent much thought on it before the birth, but it felt very natural to call her Emma. She looked like an Emma.

Emma had been the sweetest baby. She rarely cried, had an amazing appetite and was ever so attentive of her mother and surroundings. And as had been the deal, she went back to work three and a half months later, leaving Emma in the excellent care of her grandmother and grandfather – until that fateful day when a monster from another dimension hit her home and took what she most cherished.

The sun was setting outside when Kylie finally got up from the tiny bed. She had spent most of the day in there. it had been necessary. The nightmares of the past weeks were gone and only good memories filled her head now, and even though the bad ones would never be forgotten, at least she felt that they – to some level – were forgiven. The warmth still filled her every corner and made her feel at peace. The ghosts that had been chasing her had finally come to rest.

She was tired, but not exhausted even though the quality of sleep she had gotten over the past couple of weeks hadn't been the best – except for last night maybe – but she felt that she simply couldn't go back to sleep. The idea of sleep right now felt like hiding. There was a surge of energy coursing through her body and she felt the need to do something, to accomplish a task she had not been able to do in all those days of wallowing.

She turned on the TV in the living room to have some background noise, only to find that the news were on again. The news seemed to be the only thing every single channel was transmitting. Even though only half-heartedly, Kylie paid attention while figuring out what to do next. Military personnel and people from the private sector were combing the area around Garigal National Park. The whole nation was still declared state of emergency as the consequences of the Kaiju attack and nuclear blast were not only the destruction and the penetrating, but thankfully short-lived alpha radiation, but also the fine smoke materials that would be detected in the upper atmosphere for many months at least and the lasting beta radiation that contaminated land and water.

She had to closed her eyes for a moment and breathe in deeply. She felt pity for everyone out there but there was only so much she could feel. She had lost everything already and didn't care much about any future consequences for anyone. Another sigh escaped her chest, then she focused on the task at hand. From where she stood - behind the sofa she had spent so many nights on - she got quite a good view on the whole apartment. The kitchen was in dire need of cleaning, that was obvious, and in her opinion the most intelligent point to start.

The first thing she did was open all the curtains to let in what was left of the warm daylight, then she armed herself with a huge black garbage bag and Clorox wipes and proceeded to swipe most of what was on those countertops into the plastic bag. There were rests of prepared food, some boxes of take-out ordered online and dried up fruit - some even with slowly growing whitish fluff on them. Then she filled the sink with hot water and soap and swooped all the dishes in. Most of them needed a good soaking, and Kylie would let them have their time before she scrubbed away all those days of despair from them, too. She used most of the Clorox wipes on the surfaces of the kitchen, the living room and the main bathroom and scrubbed and scoured and rubbed and wiped and little by little, cleanliness and life came back to the once so dark and dank apartment - to herself.

It was dark outside when she finally felt that she has finished. Looking around now, she realized that she had not only cleaned up, she had also changed around the furniture. Maybe this could mean a new start. She now understood that she would have to make do with what was left of her life.


	9. Chapter 9

**November 3rd 2014, Sidney, Australia**

It had been a quiet two months since Scissure, there had not been any new Kaiju attacks. People – optimistic as usual – had dusted themselves off and carried on. It was an almost funny thing to watch. They had done the same after each of the three attacks before, and it seemed obvious that they would do the same after – quite possible – future attacks. Once again, everybody joined forces in the effort to get back into the routine they called life. The military helped civilians with reconstruction and cleaning away the debris. The human race was built to just overcome hardship and move on. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, wasn't that how the saying went?

Kylie had spent that time of rebuilding the city and faith recovering from the injuries sustained in the car crash and the trauma of losing her family – she had slowly begun to rebuild herself. After the "divine intervention" she had experienced in her dead daughter's room, she just couldn't bear to be alone any longer. The doctors, concerned with the physical and psychological injuries, did not share her newly obtained enthusiasm and made her rest at home for another month and have a couple of more check-ups. The psychologist seemed more than surprised to hear about how Kylie was able to drag herself out of that black hole she had gotten stuck in, but finally, during the last mandatory doctor's visit she was deemed satisfactorily recovered and given green light to return to work.

Her body still complained more than she cared to admit when she got ready to back to the office that Monday morning when she but it felt a little better now that she didn't have to deal with herself on her own anymore.

She had thought about Hansen more than just once during her time off but hadn't dared to look for him those past few days, worried about any possible consequences her contacting him could have. After all, she had helped him steal a chopper. She was also worried about what might happen to her. There had not been any official communication from the RAAF except for the medical updates, but there had to be repercussions for her actions. Most likely not for leaving the workplace, as she had been the last to leave and when there was nothing left that could have been done, but assisting Hansen in stealing the Kiowa Bell was not something that usually sat well with her superiors. Not that it had happened before, Kylie thought wryly.

She went to RAAF headquarters, since there was nothing left to do at Towra Point, and as expected, Air Vice Marshal Roberton called her into his office as soon as she arrived. She hadn't even made it to the main area where she supposed most of her colleagues were - if they hadn't perished in the catastrophe the Kaiju had unleashed on the city.

Roberton sat behind his desk, seemingly having aged a lot since the last time she had seen him - they all had. The catastrophe had hit close to home for everybody and it showed.

He was quiet, simply motioned for her to sit, obviously searching for the right words to say. Kylie beat him to it: "I am fine…"

Roberton sighed and procured a lopsided smile, then put his hands flat on his desk.

"The country has been through a lot, we all have." He paused for a second and studied her thoroughly. "Listen, Command wanted to suspend you for being involved in the unlawful apprehension of the chopper but laid down any accusations against you, holding up your clean record against the offense. Listen, as a human being and your friend I would have no spent any other thought on that since it seems that the world went to hell, but as your boss...I mean, what in the world were you thinking?" He had never been one to hold back, neither had she.

Kylie looked at him, realizing that it had not been a rhetorical question. "What I was thinking? I wasn't thinking, I was acting on instinct. An alien monster was destroying our city and there is nothing I could do against it. I tried everything, just like everybody else, and we all know how that turned out. So when I received the call for help, I helped. A man asked for help to at least try to save his family. Being suspended or even let go over facilitating the unrightful use of a military helicopter to another staff member who was determined to get his family out of the blast radius wasn't something I felt would matter in the future. It was the least I could do since I couldn't do anything for my own family." She paused for a second, biting back upcoming tears. The she cleared her throat: "Was his wife found?"

Roberton tilted his head a little to one side, looking at her curiously. Kylie could almost see the question that burned on his tongue but he never asked what this all was to her. He didn't have to ask. "No." he simply said and that was enough of an answer for her. Two months were a long time to be found.

"As I said," Roberton now continued, "Command wanted to suspend you. Well, they didn't but they suspended the fighter pilot for two months. Now, Hercules Hansen has quite the reputation, that's why they went down on him. But that was about it. He's back to his job as well, in case you wondered." He leant back in his chair.

"Now..." he said. "We need to get ahead of things and work together with the other Pan Pacific countries. Four attacks are more than enough to not take measures but I am more than sure that this has not been the last Kaiju attack and we need to be prepared for the next. They are coming from somewhere and I am pretty sure it's not outer space. I am assigning you to the new Pan Pacific Defense Corps program, they need people with your particular skill set to provide insight. So, I want you to get back into the data that was collected during the attack to find a pattern and corroborate that data with what was retrieved in Mexico, the Philippines and the USA. You were controlling tactical officer during the attack and had first-hand access to all the incoming data, so patterns might be easier to catch for you than anybody else. You will work together with Tactical from the other countries as has been decided by United Nations. You need to be technical about it, and if necessary, travel to the individual attack sites to figure out what happened. I am sure that there are parallels, we just need to find that one common denominator. They must come from somewhere. We need to find out how to stop these attacks from happening. Our regular weapons are useless, that we found out the hard way as the only thing that was able to stop the monster was a nuclear blast, and that's not something I want to repeat anytime soon. Victory came at much too high a cost."

Kylie nodded, she was definitely not in the position to make any demands on where she would continue her service. She had kind of followed the live transmission of the two-day Seoul United Nations Conference on September 14th and 15th - there had been almost no way of not seeing the relay as it was broadcasted on every single channel on either TV or radio. An American University professor, whose name she didn't care to recall, presented his idea for some sort of weapon strong enough to fight the Kaiju - another piece of information that she hadn't retained. A weapon was direly needed but she could not imagine anything as powerful to destroy the monsters as a nuclear blast without the repercussions it brought.

Roberton was right. She probably was the person for the job. She was an Air Battle Manager within the Airforce after all. So far, RAAF had been the only ones to be able to at least push the Kaiju into the desired direction, whilst during the attacks on San Francisco, Manila and Cabo, the monster had ploughed a path through the city, seemingly without bother. Tactical and combat organization were her field of play, especially Joint Terminal Attack control. And that seemed to be the thing that this newly established Pan Pacific Defense Corps now needed the most. She could - however - not imagine all the Pan Pacific Countries working together, even though after the catastrophes brought by the Kaiju there might have been a change in thought.

"Things have changed, Kylie. Nothing is the way it used to be, for any of us. But we need to move forward and get this under control because I am sure that we won't be only losing one half of a city next time."

She was very aware that things had changed. She had changed. The moment she stepped foot into Air Vice Marshal Roberton's office to report back for duty, she knew that she could not continue her professional life the exact way she had before this life-changing incident. It wasn't that she didn't feel like being around people anymore, she simply didn't want to be around the same people she had been around before. She also didn't want to be in command in the very likely event of another Kaiju attack. She knew that it had not been her fault that her team couldn't come up with any valid and viable solution during the Kaiju attack as there had been simply too many variables. But deep down, it had left her doubting her abilities and she knew that she couldn't work at her best with doubts in the back of her mind.

Roberton's "offer" to reassign her came almost as a blessing, a possibility to get her life back on track and move forward. And she could maybe even serve a bigger purpose and be of actual help in this search for a solution.

He now shifted in his chair to get up. He leant over the desk, looking at her with an apologetic smile. "This has not been your fault, Kylie. None of it. But we need to handle it before it goes south big time. I need you to attend the PPDC meeting this Sunday, 08:00. Until then, gather whatever intel you can get your hands on from Towra Point and the connected servers. There's no time to lose."


	10. Chapter 10

Driving up to Towra Point, she felt a certain tightness in her gut. She was going back to where it all had started for her. The streets were nicely cleaned, some of the damaged trees and the bridges had been fixed as much as possible. There weren't many cars out on the road, and the going was relatively easy. Absentmindedly, she slowed the small rental down to almost a halt when she passed the tree she had collided with two months ago. Of course, her car wasn't there anymore, but something inside her had somehow expected it to still be there and remind her of her own incompetence.

The stick-shift Chevrolet Corsa stalled and she just sat there, as she had after the accident, trapped inside the crashed vehicle. 'Damn you, Hansen!' she thought and wondered why he had come to mind. She remembered that this exact line had been the last thing she had said to him over the comm right before she had crashed. When she snapped out of it again, she didn't even know how she had stopped in the first place.

4 days didn't seem like enough time to collect and interpret all the data that had been gathered by the servers. Once again, time never seemed enough and she wondered if it ever would again. But in the end, it took only 36 hours, the rest was spent trying to convince the superiors of their findings - which seemed more like a sci-fi novel than reality.

Once again, Kylie was almost alone at the Towra Point post, once again working frantically in the almost abandoned facility. Only the occasional janitor or loading crew went about their duties but other than that, the huge hangar once bustling with people looked like a ghost town.

There was a constant video-commlink exchange with officers from military headquarters in San Francisco, Cabo San Lucas and Manila. It had felt better to work on her own in the beginning but she soon realized that it was a hell of a lot of data to process on all ends and she quickly found out that she would not get any sleep any time soon before coming up with results. Not she cared much - there was nobody waiting for her at home anyways. There was pressure - yes, most definitely, but not the immediate life or death pressure she had been under during the Kaiju attack and this time, she felt as if she could think more clearly.

Kylie had suggested to take a chronological approach right from the beginning in order to save time and so they began on August 10th, 2013, only hours before Trespasser had reaped the Californian coast and ended when Scissure was bombed down in Sydney on September 4th, 2014. Two common factors came together quite quickly while analyzing the recorded data. All four Kaiju had emerged from the Pacific Ocean before hitting the coastline and each was preceded by a major seaquake.

A warning system called "Kaiju Emergency Alert system" had been established early on in February, right after the second attack, but it was still only developing. It couldn't predict the third attack, let alone the fourth. There had been too many earthquakes - after all, the Pacific Rim was the most active zone in all the world.

Bayani, the officer from Manila suggested the monsters must be hiding somewhere in the deep volcanic trenches that covered the floor of Pacific Ocean, as they showed up whenever there was not only seismic but also volcanic activity from within the Pacific. This initial idea was as good as any start, even though there had been constant monitoring of plate tectonics and subductions even before the attacks had started, and none of the geo-marine survey systems data that Kylie now analyzed showed proof of entities that big simply floating around down there. They surely couldn't be living down there, the radars would have picked up on their size.

San Francisco had blown up a huge 3D map of the Pacific Ocean's floor on the massive shared screen, bringing forward all the tectonic ridges that had been shown volcanic activities lately. Usually, an earthquake - or in this case a seaquake - happened when the tectonic plates shifted. The hiding place - or whatever it actually was they were looking for - would be somewhere close to a convergence line.

And then it became clear. There were a couple of heavy ridges along the ocean floor, the deepest being the Tonga Kermadec Trench with two volcanic arcs in close proximity. It was the most linear, fastest converging and most seismically active subduction boundary on Earth, stretching out for more than 3000 km, at about 2500 km north north-east of New Zealand. It had even become its own micro oceanic plate.

It was right there that the Earth's core seemed to be more unstable than anywhere else in the world due to the terrains' fast convergence rate of 24 cm a year and the northern extension growing much faster than the southern counterpart. The trench contorted constantly, growing and convulsing into itself over and over again. It was also much younger than other ridges, having formed only about five million years ago, with what seemed strategically positioned volcanoes along its two arcs reaching as deep as 11.000 meters at Horizon Deep, its deepest point, making it the second deepest trench in the world after the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

It was also right there they could finally pinpoint the exact origin of the seaquakes on. All sensors were now focused on the Tonga Kermadec Trench, the computers rapidly relaying and replaying the information New Zealand's geo-marine survey systems had gathered on the specific days of attack. Every time a seaquake was provoked by the subduing of plate edges - according to the data from August 10th 2013 where Trespasser wrecked California, February 5th 2014 when Hundun hit Manila, June 1st 2014 with Kaiceph raging through Cabo San Lucas and finally September 2nd, marking the day of Scissure making landfall in Sydney - the convergence rate in the Tonga Kermadec Trench would increase exponentially and the three most central - and at the same time the deepest - volcanoes would suddenly activate in what seemed a gigantic connected chamber at over 10.000 meters depth - but with no visible magma transfer.

There was, however, a transfer of another sort of matter. It was a constant flow so small that sensors had never really picked up on it, especially in that region, having been mistaken for a leak in a magma chamber. But it definitely wasn't magma that streamed out at the bottom of Horizon Deep.

They all ran the data through their individual programs again and again, and every single time got the same results. The matter was alien. And it didn't come from the Earth's core. Whenever tectonic and volcanic activity appeared together, there seemed to form some sort of fissure that didn't hold anything until the Kaiju appeared through it. Bayani had the guts to say out loud what they were all thinking: "We are looking at a portal, a breech in dimensions." Cullen, the officer from San Francisco snorted but there was no defiance on his face, just pure despair. It sounded demented - deranged, insane - but it seemed to be the only possibility there was. The sensors couldn't reach into the fissure and it made them believe even more that they had discovered a path into another world - or from where they looked at it, a path from another world into theirs.

Humanity's wildest and at the same time most feared dreams apparently had come true. They had encountered alien life. Aliens had always been part of the vivid imagination of humans, usually portrayed as the enemy on a mission to destroy humanity and Earth in films and books but no one would have ever imagined them to actually be real, and much less to be a real threat. To find them at the bottom of the ocean. however, was actually something quite difficult to digest.

Science had invested so much in to space exploration, yet the much more urgent mysteries were right here, at the bottom of the planet. 95 percent of the ocean remained unexplored today, which was incredible given how much humans relied on it. The ocean affected everything, from food and travel to health and climate. While the ocean took up most of the planet, the vast majority of the underwater world remained a mystery to humans. Every year, scientists discovered thousands of incredible, and sometimes alien-like marine species, but there was still so much nobody had ever laid eyes on. But so far, exploring the ocean in the same way space was explored had been a challenge. The farthest reaches of the ocean seemed unreachable due to physical and technical hindering but shooting people in a rocket to the moon was not a fantasy at all. And, unlike the vivid images of other planets that have captured people´s imaginations, life deep below the surface usually appeared dark and unexciting.

Star Trek would have everyone believe that space was the final frontier, but though they knew little about outer space, there were still plenty of frontiers to explore here on their home planet. Now, it became clear that they were losing the race of discovery.

The results - reissued, revised and rectified by all four countries - seemed ridiculous and outrageous, but were irrefutable. The Kaiju did not originate from Earth, but them being from outer space or another dimension was not something the brain could deal with easily. The movies of old had shown huge monsters like Godzilla or King-Kong bringing about havoc - but in the end they had all been earthly creatures. This now was different, it was real, it most likely meant the end of the world as they knew it.

One factor however remained a mystery. How had the fissure formed in the first place? There was talk of conspiracy theories, and Kylie almost expected the US officer to be a Flat Earther. They bounced ideas off each other, some more ridiculous than others, but all ridiculous nonetheless. Cortez from Mexico finally brought up the aborted Apollo 13 mission in 1970, suggesting that the radioisotope thermoelectric generator had leaked nuclear fuel into Horizon Deep after having plunged right into the trench after the breakup of the rocket in the atmosphere, but atmospheric and oceanic monitoring had never indicated a release of any nuclear fuel.

In the end, Kylie thought, it didn't even matter. What mattered was the existence of alien life, dangerous alien life.


	11. Chapter 11

November 9th 2014, Sydney, Australia

The call from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps came unexpected for many, but not for Kylie. However, it sounded even more urgent than Roberton had made it sound like last Monday. They had called in everybody: military personnel, civilians, even the media. And now she was here, at Glenbrook Base, inside the largest hangar with what seemed at least 3000 people, all perched together like chickens. She had never seen so many people crowded together in one place, yet she was lucky to have found a seat – on one of the makeshift tables that held coffee and cookies.

Stepping through the guarded gates at Glenbrook, she had to suppress an almost hysterical chuckle when she caught herself actually looking for the Kiowa Bell when she entered the premises of the military base. Following the mass of people that had responded the call had her passing by Hangar 29 and to her surprise, the chopper was still there – only now it was heavily guarded by two men with automatic assault rifles unlike last time she had seen it. Her doing, she thought, but it had helped save a life.

The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps was an organization that had been created by the United Nations only weeks ago, something that they had made very public over advertisements and the TV. The PPDC represented an international alliance of twenty-one countries across the Pacific Rim, which were all in this together with the common goal of containing, combating and eliminating the Kaiju. The need for teamwork was more than obvious and apparently, they also needed the manpower. The Kaiju were a real and ongoing threat and that threat needed to be dealt with accordingly, especially after the latest findings.

She had to suppress an almost hysterical chuckle when she suddenly remembered that she actually was on the lookout for the Kiowa Bell when she entered the premises of the military base. Following the mass of people that had responded the call had her passing by Hangar 29 and to her surprise, the chopper was there – still there? - only now it was heavily guarded by two men with automatic assault rifles unlike last time she had seen it. Her doing, she thought, but it had helped save a life - one life out of three, she thought bitterly.

Kylie caught herself scanning the room for the familiar face of Hansen but seemed out of luck. She couldn't see him anywhere, however, there were too many people she had never seen before in her life and all had their eyes tied to the small makeshift stage, listening to the Minister for Defense Marise Payne and the Chief of the Defense Force Mark Binskin while they talked about how the Australian Defense Force was technologically sophisticated but relatively small in numbers, making it smaller than most Asian military forces despite being the largest military in Oceania. The ADF however was supported by a significant budget by worldwide standards and was now actively investing in something they called the Jaeger Program.

Following that last – until now – Kaiju attack on Sydney, a United Nations conference had been called in Seoul, South Korea, on September 15. Apparently, the grievous attacks of alien monsters were the main reason for the United Nations to set aside their differences and work together. And so, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps was founded. During the conference, the Drs. Jasper Schoenfeld and Caitlin Lightcap presented their idea for tactical retaliation and defense.

Jaegers, gigantic robots loaded with high tech weaponry, neurally linked to humans.

In the short amount of time since the first Kaiju attack, the two scientists in charge had done a lot of work and research and had come up with a system to fight them by creating a neural link between the human pilots and a huge machine. The funny thing was that Dr. Schoenfeld apparently had come up with the idea to build the Jaegers watching his young son play Monsters vs. Robots during the first attack on San Francisco and his wife Dr. Lightcap had already been working on the neural network for quite a while as a top secret military program.

On cue, a broad-shouldered black man took the makeshift stage. He barely needed the microphone, his deep, resonating baritone echoed through the hall with ease. He introduced himself as PPDC Ranger Stacker Pentecost, a former British Royal Airforce pilot. He had just come back from Germany where he was overseeing the further development for Dr. Lightcap's neural bridge controls and Pons interface to finalize and perfect the Jaeger equipment.

There was an air of almost touchable desperation in the air, mostly because apparently, another attack seemed imminent - why else would they call for such a big meeting and present ideas of big-ass robots to defend the coastlines? Roberton had mentioned that every big Pan Pacific country would be holding such a meeting in the near future. All of Australia's Royal Airforce, Army and Navy personnel had been called in and Kylie got the feeling that this came close to some sort of open recruiting session.

Behind Pentecost, a huge screen began to display images of bits and pieces of those huge machines and his trying out the interface to move the machines.

She saw some of her colleagues, wide-eyed and all ears, and some of the higher ranking officers with serious doubt displayed quite openly on their faces. Kylie listened unenthusiastically. There was a lot of tech talk that she didn't care to understand, and talk about some people that she didn't care to know. Her attention was on the man on the stage.

"Alien life in the form of monsters we call Kaiju, are entering our world from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean through a fissure at the deepest point of the Tonga Kermadec Ridge, about 2500 km off of New Zealand. There, apparently, the Earth's core is most unstable so as to have favored that breach but that's about as much as we know. This fissure is acting as a portal between dimensions. We _are_ monitoring it. The Emergency Alert System has been updated and is now working at a 100% for all Pan Pacific cities. We are registering and analyzing every movement from within."

Pentecost paused for a moment and looked around. "The Jaeger Program begins today, people! The first Jaeger prototype, designation Brawler Yukon, is being built as we speak and we are on standby for 5 more. Just this morning, I personally ran the first test drive with the neural Pons system. The Pan Pacific countries have issued funding for the construction of a total of 30 Jaegers until 2019."

He paused for a moment, probably being aware of everybody's eyes growing bigger and bigger with incomprehension. "The Jaegers…" he went on, "are a special type of giant mobile humanoid weapon which will stand up to the Kaiju without having to resort to nuclear weapons. So far, nuclear bombs have proven to be the only effective measure against them, but we all know the consequences. The Jaegers will be the most effective first and last line of defense against the Kaiju in this war they have brought upon us."

Nice, Kylie thought. They were building monsters of their own to fight the monsters that had come to destroy our planet. Well, it kind of sounded like a plan - since nobody else had come up with any other idea so far, apart from bombing the Kaiju and the people of the attacked cities into oblivion.

"As an alternative to nuclear weaponry, which was the last and only resource that proved useful, the Jaegers are designed to generate as much kinetic energy as tactical ordnance. They are built to match the estimated scale of Kaiju, and minimize the damage created by conventional weapons. Given the toxic nature of the Kaiju, Jaegers will be required to rely on hand-to-hand combat and close-quarters weapons such as swords or other blade-type weapons. Heat-based weapons such as plasma casters will minimize the spread of Kaiju Blue, as they can wound and cauterize the creatures at the same time. In order to prevent damage to major cities, the idea is to deploy Jaegers into the neighboring harbors or oceans of cities that hug the coastlines of the Pacific Rim. A Jaeger's priority is to prevent the Kaiju from crossing the Miracle Mile, the last-ditch perimeter within a few miles offshore."

Pentecost's voice boomed through the room. "We are also already well into the process of building military bases called Shatterdomes, spread strategically across the Pan Pacific coastline. The first one to be finished within the next three weeks" – record time, Kylie thought – "is Hong Kong, Other future bases are Lima, Anchorage, Vladivostok, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Sydney, Los Angeles and Panama City." Pentecost continued to explain.

People began to talk among themselves. The idea of having one of those facilities close by seemed to instill a bit of hope in the soldiers.

"When will the Sydney base be operational?" came several shouts from the audience.

Pentecost raised his hands to shush them, but there was a slight smile playing across his face. "Soon, very soon indeed."

Kylie looked at him with a frown. That answer didn't carry any valuable degree of satisfaction, yet the masses seemed content. Pentecost really had stage presence, but she felt that there was something underneath that she couldn't just put her finger on - he must have lost someone dear as well. He however didn't let any upcoming emotions - if there were any, Kylie wasn't too sure - get to him as he now continued.

"There is hope! We will not let them win! But we need you to do your part. The Jaeger program is launched today. In less than a month, the training grounds on Kodiak Island will be opened and I truly hope to see many of you there. This is not some ancient Japanese legend, the threat is all too real. We are all in this together and we all can carry our share of the load to defeat these monsters, whether we are in it for revenge or for duty to our countries."

The crowd broke into a cheer and Kylie felt a bit like being at a Rugby Match. Yet she could understand why everybody was cheering. They saw a possibility of winning over these highly destructive creatures and the PPDC was offering every single one of them the chance to join them and help wherever they could. This was more than simple patriotism, the whole of the Pan-Pacific was joining forces in an effort that might determine the fate of humanity.

Pentecost stepped off the makeshift stage and it seemed as if the meeting was over. Slowly, the crowd dispersed and broke into smaller groups, in which the only topic of talk was the Jaeger program. Kylie remained at her spot on the coffee table while everyone else slowly cleared out of the hangar, reminiscing about everything that had been said.


	12. Chapter 12

For probably the seventh time, she refilled on the coffee, right before a stern-eyed woman pulled the thermos from Kylie's hands, while the masses were slowly clearing out of the hangar. Yet, there was little to no energy in her body to follow them outside. In her head, she mused about the revelations that meetings had provided.

"I figured I'd find you here…" she suddenly heard a deep, mellow voice behind her. She jerked around, only to see Herc standing there with his piercing blue eyes and his usual lopsided - almost apologetic - smile. The freckles on his slightly tanned face stood out even more than she remembered but then again, she hadn't really seen him with his face clean. But apart from that, he looked very much the same to what she remembered. She had been in a lot of pain back then, though. "They're recruiting, it seems."

She didn't even have the chance to reply to Herc.

"Yeah! For war! And I can tell you, this time we will kick the Kaiju's arses!" That voice was unfamiliar and it didn't come from him. Kylie looked over his shoulder at the man that had snuck up on both of them. The resemblance was uncanny. He was a little less stocky but had the same short cropped, ginger hair and blue eyes.

Herc had followed her gaze and now cleared his throat, and when Kylie looked at Herc, she saw a worried frown flit across his face. "This is my brother, Scott."

The tone of his voice made her frown a little. It almost felt as if he didn't want both of them to meet.

Eagerly - maybe a little too eagerly - Scott extended his hand and grabbed for hers, shaking it as if they were old friends. "Such a pleasure to meet you, darling!"

Even that very first exchange of words rubbed Kylie the wrong way, the fact that Scott was a lady's man was irrefutable. She nodded politely in his general direction when she heard Herc hiss a stinging "Don't!" at him. Scott let go of her hand and stepped back, but not without a smirk on his face. Kylie tried to ignore him and turned back to Herc.

"So I see you brought the chopper back…" What an awkward way of starting small talk.

"Told you I did..." Herc was painfully trying to keep that little bit of conversation they had there going.

"Yeah…" she said. "I saw it sitting in its usual spot coming in."

"Heavily guarded this time. Our doing, I suspect." His voice was hushed. "I was actually accompanied by one of the gate guards, just to make sure I wouldn't try to steal it again." Herc's mouth twisted into a slight smile, which disappeared as quickly as it had appeared when he now leaned in closer.

"Thank you…" He whispered without looking at her.

Kylie waved a hand dismissively, unable to even look at him. He got the clue, and didn't go on. They didn't need to talk about what happened.

"You look...well." He said after a slight pause.

Kylie pursed her lips into a slight smile. "You too…"

They both sucked at lying, and both had to snort out a laugh. The last time they had seen each other, they both had been a wreck, literally speaking.

"How's your boy?" Kylie asked now.

"Quite well, he's with his grandparents at the moment." Herc looked her dead in the eye. "It's not been easy, he asks for his mother every day. I don't know what to tell him."

She looked away, not being able to bear his blue eyes piercing hers. "I wouldn't know what to say…"

And then there was Scott again. "Listen, you two lovebirds, it looks like they are about to close this hangar and we are literally the only three people left in here. Maybe we should take it elsewhere?" He swung around, squeezed into the space between the two and put his arms around them, probably thinking it was funny. "You should come with us get a bite to eat. It will be fun! I bet you two have some catching up to do." Scott beamed from ear to ear, and Kylie hated it. He talked too much, that was obvious.

Herc - as well as Kylie - was visually upset with the lovebird remark and Kylie understood only too well. He had just lost his wife. But Scott wouldn't back off. He actually dared to hook his arm under hers and pull her with him. He didn't even know her! Herc's face showed despair, but he simply tagged alongside his brother, nodding to Kylie that it was ok if she tagged along - at least that's what she thought he meant.

Before they stepped out of the gates of Glenbrook, they were stopped by the man that had been on stage, Stacker Pentecost. After a sharp nod towards Kylie and Scott - which apparently was supposed to be a greeting - he pulled Herc to one side, out of hearing distance.

Scott had an idiotic grin on his face as he now leaned over to her. "They go way back, those two."

Kylie rolled her eyes. 'Who asked you, anyways?' she wondered and hoped if he thought that he was making an impression on her.

She watched Herc and Pentecost talk for a couple of minutes, pretending to not hear anything that Scott said. He didn't even seem to care, he apparently liked to hear himself talk. But Kylie didn't like what she saw. Pentecost suddenly placed one arm around Herc's shoulder and leant in close and the next thing she saw was that Herc's usual upright posture changed - his shoulders slumped forward, his head hung low and she suspected that he had just received some really bad news. But it lasted only for a second, he straightened up immediately, brushed his hands across his chest to straighten out his uniform and - quite formally - shook the other man's hand before retreating.

He came back with a very fake smile plastered across his face. Ignoring Kylie's questioning glance, he set course for the parking lot and didn't look back once. Kylie however did, and saw Pentecost leaning against the frame of the small door in the much larger hangar gate with a wistful look on his face, before Scott dragged her along quickly to follow Herc to the car.

Scott took them to Zambrero, a classic Mexican Restaurant just a few minutes' drive away from the Glenbrook base, a little off the M4. Many of the restaurants downtown that had not gotten totally destroyed, were still recovering from the damage.

Kylie liked Mexican food, she would often order take away from Mad Mex or go to Flying Fajita Sistas or Mejico with her friends or colleagues - before. It hit her quite hard - almost like a painful jab to the stomach - that she didn't seem to have any friends anymore, nor colleagues she cared about. She realized that she kind of missed those nights out on Tequila.

They ordered a couple of burritos, tacos and nachos, and accompanied the food with beer for the men and wine for the lady. Kylie at least hadn't even been that hungry to start with, but with the food and the good company came the appetite. Herc was grumpy as usual, but became a little livelier as the evening went along, and Scott, however annoying he was, gave the whole situation a funny edge.

The waitress, a busty, flirty little blonde, already seemed to know him, as they got familiar quite quickly.

Herc didn't seem to care. He asked Kylie about how she had been, how recovery came along and apologized for not having visited her in the hospital or later at home, even though he realized that it would have been an awkward undertaking. She noticed that he was very careful to not let his questions go too deep. Kylie in return asked superficial questions about Chuck and how he had been dealing with the situation.

It wasn't what could have been considered entertaining conversation. Scott finally excused himself from the table and both Kylie and Herc watched him chase after the waitress.

Herc was the first to audibly sigh. "I am sorry for that…He's…"

"...an ass?" Kylie offered as an answer, which in return made him smile a little.

"Yeah, kind of. He has always been that way."

Kylie bit her lower lip. Was he making excuses for his little brother? All he needed was a good kick in the arse. Yet, it was useless to reprimand Herc - being the older brother - about Scott's shitty behaviour. "You're just so different, that's all."

How Herc had to laugh a little. "Thank God for that!"

"So, what about that buddy of yours? He was quite convincing up there on stage." Kylie changed the topic.

"Pentecost? Well, Stacker went into the program not entirely selfless." Herc smiled lopsided. "I guess everybody who volunteered had lost someone in the Kaiju attacks. His sister was killed by a Kaiju, the first that attacked San Francisco and now all he thinks about is finding a way to destroy them. Her loss was a heavy blow for him, emotionally speaking, as she was the only family member he had left."

Kylie swallowed hard. Stacker Pentecost wasn't the only one who had lost loved ones. She then tried a half-hearted smile to mimic his. "And you?"

"Me?" That gave him pause. He thought for a moment, his eyes searching hers as if looking for the answer. "I guess that's why I am here…" He looked at her. "That's why we all are here. There are many capable men and women in the Australian military, and many are eager to enlist."

"As you are…"

"As I am…"

Both sipped their beer in silence. Then Kylie couldn't hold back anymore.

"What was it that you and Pentecost talked about back at Glenbrook?" she asked in a low voice.

He didn't answer immediately and Kylie didn't force it. She just watched him play with a napkin for a few moments, while she sat back, thinking about how insensitive her question had been.

Just when she was about to apologize and take the question back because it was none of her damn business, he cleared his throat.

"My wife has been officially declared dead in absentia…" he dropped on her right before she could open her mouth. She almost forgot how to breathe. "She was working downtown. Reports showed that the building she worked in was completely destroyed. Maybe she got out, but she should have resurfaced by now, one way or the other." Kylie was surprised how emotionless Herc related those details. "I guessed it was just sit and wait for any new info since there was no way of knowing until all shelters and hospitals had their databases up to date. The RAAF assumes that enough time has passed."

Instinctively, she reached out for his hand and squeezed it lightly. His smile now had a heartbroken quality to it. She couldn't even have imagined that his wife hadn't made it out. She was left speechless.

"I kind of knew, though. And I will have to accept her death, even though hope dies last, she might still be alive out there." He took a sip from his beer. "Chuck is a totally different story, though. He blames me, goddamnit, I blame myself! He doesn't know any better, he's still so young, but I really hope that he will find it in himself to forgive me one day."

Kylie listened to him with her mouth gaping until he finally stopped. "What on earth are you rambling on about? None of it has been your fault. That little shit can be happy that he's alive. And let me remind you, he's only alive because of you! He is alive because you risked your life to get him and his mother out. And you're telling me know that all of that isn't good enough for him?" She had to try real hard to not raise her voice.

It was Herc's turn now to glare at her with his mouth open, before he lowered his eyes to look at her hand on his. "Well, he's only a child, he needs time. Angela and I…well, we were having problems lately." Herc didn't seem too comfortable talking about his private life. But then again, Kylie wondered, why would he share that kind of information with her? His face changed, the hardness she had noticed earlier had left his eyes. "He saw that. I guess that's on me."

Kylie wanted to slap the man sitting opposite her, but at the same time she felt sad for him. Being a single parent - which Herc seemed to be now - was never easy, especially not under the present circumstances. And with an angry and upset child like Chuck seemed to be was hard to handle, especially for the type of man Herc seemed to be.

Both sat brooding for a while, then Kylie said apologetically: "I am sorry about calling Chuck a little shit. It's none of my business."

Herc just shrugged and smiled a little. "He might just be." His eyes were tied to her hand still holding his and Kylie really only then realized how inappropriate that was.

Suddenly, Scott was back, the giggly waitress in tow. Both seemed a little drunk, but happy. Herc wasn't having any of it. He ordered the check, growling under his breath as he addressed the waitress, and never cast a glance at his brother as he silently paid for everybody's meal. Being the old-fashioned gentleman that he was, he didn't accept Kylie's offer to pay or split the check. To her, it felt like the concept of him not being the one to pay didn't compute for him.

Herc drove as Scott was sulking in the back seat. He wasn't anywhere close to acting like a grown up person, Kylie reminisced but didn't say anything.

The drove in silence until Herc pulled up in front of Kylie's apartment complex.

"Thanks for the, boys." She smiled as she got out of the car and walked around to the driver's window. "And thanks for the food and the good company. It felt good to be able to take my mind off of everything that had happened."

"The pleasure was all mine!" came the slurred reply from where Scott laid sprawled across the back seat.

Herc growled again, which made Kylie smile. "I had a great time…" she said quietly and in return, Herc smiled as well before nodding a goodbye and driving off.


	13. Chapter 13

June 1st 2015, Kodiak Island, Alaska

Roberton had called it the perfect opportunity but all Kylie could appreciate right now was the biting cold and how much she already hated it. If that was what late spring looked like here in Alaska, she didn't even want to know about how winter felt like. The weather report had mentioned highs of up to 18 degrees but the ice-cold wind made it feel like 18 degrees below zero. Kylie had only ever known the always temperate and year-round sunny weather of New South Wales, so this here was quite a severe change for her.

The worst thing about it was that she had brought this upon herself entirely. After the PPDC meeting on the 9th of November, she got assigned to desk work at HQ to basically redistribute personnel and machinery to the recovered and rebuilt RAAF defense facilities. For obvious reasons, it didn't fulfill her - not in any way, not even close. Roberton understood. He told her that she was not the first to ask for a transfer into the PPDC, with the difference that most of the others wanting to be directly involved in the with the Jaeger production. Most of the highest ranking officers, especially fighter pilots and combat specialists, were beginning the full training program at the Jaeger in Alaska.

The flight had been packed with military personnel from countries that bordered the Pacific coastline, some from the cities that already suffered an attack, others who wanted to anticipate. But the purpose of each of them was the same: to unite forces in the war the Kaiju brought with them. Almost a month after the first candidates, who were mostly looking to fill the Jaeger pilot positions, had settled into the training process, Kylie was now part of the third batch of military personnel to deploy here after the Jaeger Academy officially opened their doors.

The plane - a small Ravn Air DeHavilland Dash 8 turbo-prop aircraft - had arrived into Kodiak at 07:00 am as the first flight of the Monday morning after a little more than an hour. It would have taken only a little less time if she had been on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737, an airplane much more comfortable. But she hadn't chosen the flight, and honestly, who would have cared for a one-hour flight. Weather conditions hadn't been optimal, hard winds had been a major concern all night and the passengers had gotten their fair share of turbulence. The smaller planes were allowed to operate at lesser minimum weather clearances than the larger jets and made it in and out of the Kodiak State Airport with greater frequency.

Kodiak Island was a large island on the south coast of the U.S. state of Alaska, separated from the Alaska mainland by the Shelikof Strait, with Kodiak City being one of seven communities and the main city of the island. Since the two scientists that came up with the design of the Jaegers were American and the initial funding for a basic version of the pons system had come from Carnegie Mellon University, the choosing of the place had been obvious.

Also, the United States Navy operated a small training base near the city called Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment Kodiak which usually trained United States Navy SEALs in cold weather survival and advanced tactics. Now, the fully established complex together with the strategically placed outposts of the United States Coast Guard served another purpose, to train the prospects of the Jaeger Academy. It was the newest creation of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps to train pilots and technicians in the war against the Kaiju.

It was also the birthplace of the very first Jaeger. Brawler Yukon had been designed and built here, and the PPDC had been relentlessly issuing news and updates about the progress of that very first Jaeger with live feeds and news blocks on every channel - every day. Apart from its quite impressive height and weight, it didn't look like it could do much, though. Standing on two stubby legs, the Jaeger didn't have a very humanoid structure with its large, hunched body and an equally large neck leading up to a relatively small head. The huge dome-shaped armor plating around its shoulders and long thin arms with massive cauterizing blades attached to them at least gave it a powerful and scary look. Those blades and the mortar-like missiles that would fire off of its back did their fair share to convince people that the machine could actually stand a chance against the Kaiju.

The end of the building process on the 30th of January 2015 was celebrated all over the world, and as usual for the USA, with all possible pomp and pride, as the designation on the Jaeger clearly stated that it was American, and it was a monumental celebration indeed - fit for the release of the colossal machine.

it was only later that night when its first demo was performed by USAF Captain Adam Casey, a seasoned soldier with vast expertise in technological weaponry. Captain Casey managed a moderately stable connection in the first place, but after only a couple of minutes lost control over the machine, suffering a seizure during the procedure, sending the huge steel robot crashing to the ground.

Suddenly all official transmission had ceased. It was only two days later that the broadcasting was taken up again. The unfortunate death of Captain Casey was officially confirmed. Casualties were never the desired outcome, but with the current situation of alien attacks on their doorsteps, it was all considered necessary in the name of scientific advances. A second demonstration was scheduled immediately to be carried out on February 18th by Lieutenant Sergio D'Onofrio. At the same time, a memo was released that the machine was only a prototype to test out the final details for the production of the other Jaegers and not designed for direct combat.

D'Onofrio managed to make the Jaeger walk for the cameras - recorded this time for safety purposes and not in live transmission -, but also suffered a seizure, most likely triggered by the intense neural load on his brain. Strategies were changed and in the next attempt just a few moments later, Dr. Lightcap connected to the Jaeger together with D'Onofrio and this time, the drift was strong. The demonstration, however short it was, was deemed a complete success and the higher-ups of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps move to authorize more funding for the Jaeger Program and thus, speeding up the process of building of more Jaegers and Shatterdomes.

The first Shatterdome to be inaugurated later during the year was Hong Kong and there were 5 Jaegers close to finishing, two from Japan, one from China, a second from the USA and one from Russia. Scheduling had them in for the final inspection throughout the month of December 2015.

During the early morning hours of April 23rd 2015, another Kaiju, code-named Karloff, emerged from the fissure and attacked Vancouver. It got picked up by the Pacific tracking network quite quickly, but with the other Jaegers still in construction and far from being battle-ready, the Mark-1 prototype Brawler Yukon manned with D'Onofrio and Lightcap, was sent to stop the monster and defend the city. And it sure did. When the dust cleared, the message was clear to the world - the Jaegers were more than suitable to defend the world, proving an even bigger success for the PPDC as it demonstrated the viability of the Jaeger Program.

With it also came the green light to the opening of the Jaeger Academy on Kodiak Island, which served both as a recruitment and training center, working to prepare future Ranger pilots and candidates for service within the PPDC for the physical and mental demands it required. The main figure promoting the recruitment of military personnel was none other than Stacker Pentecost, who - at least for Kylie - was the visible face of faith and trust in the program, and he seemed to be the inspiration for many of the people that had travelled here with her. At least, he was for her.

To Kylie, Kodiak felt like possibly the coldest place on Earth and all she could think about was the fact that it was Summer on most of the other states of the USA. Even in back in Sydney, the winter was much less harsh than here, in fact, temperatures generally climbed over the 20°C mark, and easily so. The moment she had stepped off the plane, the temperature was only a low 3°C as it was quite early and her nose started running and she felt like tiny sharp popsicles began to form. Having such a cold morning was quite unusual for the time of year, a local told her and Kylie couldn't shake the thought that maybe it was a bad omen? Her eyes burned and watered up, and she couldn't feel her ears, cheeks nor fingertips anymore. She wondered if that would ever go away over the course of the next 24 weeks. At least it was daylight. She didn't know why she had expected it to be always dark. It must have been one of the many misconceptions she had, as she considered Alaska to generally be cold and dark.

The first thing they all saw when they arrived at the training grounds was Brawler Yukon in all its pride and glory as it was being constantly maintained to make sure that it was combat-ready, should another Kaiju appear on the screens. She looked at the people she was sharing the shuttle bus with - mainly men - excitedly gasp at the gigantic robot and had to suppress a laugh. Something along the lines of male egos and size had fluttered through her brain, as she saw their eyes glisten. She smiled slightly at the fact that they were mostly likely imagining themselves piloting that huge metal fighting machine.

Once inside, they were split into three groups, according to their field-of-work choice. Then, personal interviews followed. Everybody received their curriculums and were shown their quarters.

Kylie was placed together with the three female officers who had arrived with her into one of the barracks, the smallest of the 10, but it still felt wide like a football field. There weren't many female officers, all in all they were 27 up to now, compared to the 387 men that had arrived only during this first month alone. This was nothing new for her, even in her field of work, she had always been a minority. Still, it was much better this way as she could at least get some privacy around here, since Kylie assumed that the men's barracks to be almost overcrowded.

Even though the barrack was huge, the women grouped together in the front part and each chose a bunk. This would be their home for the next couple of months. Except that it didn't feel like home, at least not for Kylie. But after all, it was still better than sitting behind a desk back in Sydney, having to return each night to an empty apartment.


End file.
